Roosevelt was breaking no law at the time he sought a third term. The two-term presidential limit was a mere custom established when George Washington stepped down voluntarily after eight years in office. Two presidents—Ulysses S. Grant in 1880, and FDR’s fifth cousin Theodore Roosevelt in 1912—had previously tried (and failed) to return to the White House for third, nonconsecutive terms. Roosevelt’s victory was not a surprise, and certainly not to readers of this magazine at the time. Barely a year into FDR’s second term, the journalist J. Frederick Essary made a prediction that would hold up much better than McMaster’s: “If Mr. Roosevelt runs a third time,” Essary wrote, “he will be renominated and reëlected.”
But no president would do so again. Roosevelt won a fourth term in 1944, as the nation chose not to replace its commander in chief during the height of World War II. The president’s worsening health was unknown to the public, and he died less than three months after his fourth inauguration, in April 1945. His death, and the end of the war soon after, revived a debate over whether to formalize what McMaster called “the unwritten law of the Republic.” America’s founders had considered writing a term limit into the original Constitution as a way to prevent a power-hungry president from becoming too much like a king. After Roosevelt’s death in office, and after having just fought a war to defeat dictators in Europe, that argument gained new momentum. In 1951, the states ratified the Twenty-Second Amendment, which says that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Such an ironclad prohibition would seem to rule out a third term for President Donald Trump. But that hasn’t stopped him or his biggest supporters from musing about the possibility of another run in 2028. “I’m not joking,” he told NBC News last month. “There are methods which you could do it.” (As if to prove the point, or to troll his critics, the official retail website of Trump’s company is now selling Trump 2028 hats.) When my colleague Ashley Parker asked Trump about a possible third term last week, he said it was “not something that I’m looking to do.” But he was clearly intrigued by the idea: “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?”