Project 2025 partner floats repealing the 22nd Amendment and allowing Trump to serve a third term
Written by Madeline Peltz
Published
The American Conservative, a right-wing blog and Project 2025 partner, published an article advocating to repeal the 22nd Amendment so that Donald Trump would be able to serve a third term.
The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, limits a president to serving two terms. It was adopted after former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a third and fourth term amid public concerns about a “long-term president.”
An article headlined “Trump 2028” published in The American Conservative advocates for the amendment’s repeal so that Trump could be eligible to serve a third term should he win the 2024 election. The American Conservative is a partner of Project 2025, the conservative movement’s comprehensive transition plan for the next Republican presidency. Project 2025 — organized and led by The Heritage Foundation, a leading right-wing think tank — is a policy and staffing initiative that threatens to weaken democracy, significantly roll back civil rights, and exacerbate climate change, among other issues.
Peter Tonguette, a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner who also regularly writes for The American Conservative, dubiously argues in his piece that the drafters of the 22nd Amendment could not have anticipated a president who would serve nonconsecutive terms, a possibility that he argues is a reflection of Trump’s supposedly unique popularity. (Polls show that the majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of the former president.) He says voters should not be “denied the freedom” to elect him to a third term.
He describes the 22nd Amendment as “plainly unfair” and places “artificial limits” on “voter choice.” From the blog:
As the primary season has shown us, the Republicans have not moved on from Trump—yet the Twenty-second Amendment works to constrain their enthusiasm by prohibiting them from rewarding Trump with re-election four years from now.
This is plainly unfair.
…
The case of Donald Trump, however, makes an even more forceful ethical argument against the Twenty-second Amendment and for its repeal: If a man who once was president returns, after a series of years, to stand again for the office and proves so popular as to earn a second nonconsecutive term—as Trump seems bound to do—to deny him the right to run for a second consecutive term cuts against basic fair play. If, by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?
He concludes: “Trump in 2028!”
Project 2025 is backed by a coalition of over 100 organizations and individuals, at least two-thirds of which receive funding from the Koch network or conservative philanthropist Leonard Leo. The project has also been heavily promoted by MAGA-connected media figures such as Steve Bannon, who has called it the “blueprint” for Trump's second term on his War Room podcast.
Tonguette is also the author of such luminary blogs as “Long Live the Common Cold,” which he describes as “one of life’s most valuable little trials,” and “My Mother Loved Donald Trump.”