Save America: Immediately Repeal the 22nd Amendment
The Urgency of Shifting Term Limits from the Executive to the Legislative Branch
While America’s top-down global and domestic flavors of socialism seek to define the freedoms afforded to citizens as a function of their cooperation and service to the group, its enormous economic engine is built on the innovation and greed of self-interested individuals asking not “who will let us” but rather “who will stop me?”. Donald Trump asked the same question, which the collectivists and mystics of the world tried to answer with their weaponization of the justice system and assassination attempts, respectively. They failed. The questions facing the President and his supporters are whether he will be effective in his stated goal of “draining the swamp” by bringing transparency and election integrity, and how world peace and economic progress, so dependent on his individual achievements, can be maintained after the end of his second term.
Although the President has acknowledged calls for him to run for a third term, thus far, he has indicated he remains focused only on his second term. When a friend first alerted me to the mentions of a potential “third term”, it was presented as being part of the President’s agenda, for which I haven’t found much support. At first, I was highly suspicious, wondering if the President might someday follow Vladimir Putin’s example of continually extending his Presidency, and imagining the paths to dictatorship described in Ominous Parallels, which outlines how American culture might give rise to a dictator, based on parallels with socialist Germany prior to World War II (Peikoff, 1983). Feeling conflicted, I decided to analyze the issue. I asked when, if ever, term limits are appropriate, how to prevent a dictatorship, and what this means for President Trump. To my shock, I kept coming to the same conclusion—the safety and stability of the world demands a path be paved to President Trump’s third term.
The Collective-Individual Paradigm in Term Limits
America is a constitutional republic built on a system of checks and balances of power, helping to safeguard against tyrants, government overreach, coups, and power grabs (Rand, 1984). Currently, members of Congress may be elected to any number of terms on the federal level, and the Supreme Court has rejected state-level attempts to impose term limits in federal elections. Term limits were once also not part of the checks on presidential power.
The status quo of unlimited terms in Congress and a two-term limit (plus two years of another President’s term) for the President has existed for less than half the country’s history. The twenty-second (22nd) Amendment was a reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms, which spanned from 1933 until he died in 1945, understandably casting him as America’s “dictator for life” to some supporters of the Amendment. Roosevelt’s move to pack the Supreme Court, pushed during the Biden Administration and once again revived by Democrats in recent years, contributed to this perception. The all-out ban on third-term Presidents achieved the goal of creating a necessary safeguard, but was it overly restrictive in doing so?
Checks to abuses of power are important, but the conditions under which a dictator can come to power – censorship, expropriation of property, executions without trial or with mock trials, and one-party rule – can be prevented through oversight, laws, investigations, election commissions, and greater transparency within the Department of Justice. Regardless of how tired opponents may grow of a lawfully and freely elected President, if no undue interference exists, then the will of the American people must be respected.
Individualistic roles, in this case, the President of the United States of America, are optimized by the selection of the best available individual, without pre-filtering the public’s pool of potential candidates. Candidates are already filtered by the intelligence community, opaque socialist networks, and perhaps even secret societies (think ‘Skull and Bones’, whose membership has sometimes included both the Republican and Democratic candidates, as with John Kerry and George W. Bush). Selecting sub-optimal leaders due to limited choice puts the domestic and foreign interests of the United States at risk, so checks and balances preventing the rise of a dictator are better addressed through government transparency, oversight, and free speech, rather than by limiting terms in the executive branch.

Legislative collectives like the House of Representatives and the Senate, on the other hand, serve better as agents of the will of their constituents, elected to pursue their publicly stated platforms. They should write, propose, and vote upon legislation corresponding to those platforms, and not according to unknown, back-room agreements, exchanges of political favors, or other “swamp”-based opaque motivations common to career politicians.
Assuming there is a large pool of potential Congressional candidates and that voters can therefore find many candidates whose platforms sufficiently correspond to their beliefs, members of the legislative branch are comparatively interchangeable, relative to the executive branch. Congressional term limits would serve as an effective tool for ensuring adequate representation of the People and transparency in government. Although they could serve a similar function in the executive branch, the individualistic nature of the role of President means that sub-optimal choices from filtering on term limits will be more impactful. Replacing the 22nd Amendment’s Presidential term limits with more extensive election integrity measures, anti-censorship measures, tools to fight conspiracy, and Congressional term limits could improve the overall quality of American politics.
Why We Must Act Now, Before It’s Too Late
Regardless of the potential of Presidential term limits to lead to sub-optimal candidates, American politics has mostly fared well under the 22nd Amendment. Power has been reliably handed off between parties despite contested results from both parties and American voters have been offered meaningfully distinct choices in primaries and general elections. Why is it now so urgent to replace the 22nd Amendment with modernized government, using a lighter touch and smarter approach to prevent the rise of a tyrant?
Beginning with the creation and escape of the COVID-19 virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world has experienced great unrest and abnormally high losses of human life. During the Biden Administration, wars broke out in Russia and the Middle East, with the invasion of Ukraine and the Iran-ISIS war against Israel launched with the October 7, 2023 mass invasion of civilian populations, where families were brutally terrorized and murdered in front of one another. President Trump, in office less than half of his second term, has managed to single-handedly manage de-escalation of Russo-Ukrainian tensions, Ukrainian recovery efforts, and not only secured the release of Israeli hostages, but ended the Israel-Iran conflict through combined anti-terror action and diplomacy.
Iran, as well as Hamas and other ISIS-aligned terror networks, remain clear and present dangers to not only the region, but the world. Although President Trump partnered with Israel to defeat the nuclear weaponization the threat remains and may well re-escalate. In the recent past, Russian government officials and President Putin made countless implied and explicit nuclear threats against the United States. Iran’s next-gen warship and giant drone swarms have plagued the American East Coast while its hackers launched a cyber offensive and China’s espionage, piracy, and military aggressions against Taiwan have grown (Central European Institute of Asian Studies, 2025; Department of Homeland Security, 2025; The Times of Israel Staff, 2025; Wilson Center, 2024).
Although the American President has managed to forge a peace and improve international trade conditions for America, the gains are delicate and highly reliant on President Trump as the specific dealmaker overseeing all major negotiations. His importance is only underscored by the attempts and threats on his life from America’s enemies, some involving American citizens as gunmen, others directly from Iran or terror networks. While America’s strong leader has seemingly counterbalanced those in the world who would rule by force with a heavy hand, he has barely more than two years remaining, while Vladimir Putin may remain in office for life, re-Stalinizing, and rebuilding the USSR, while terrorism rages on for another generation, and the less free world encroaches on freedoms worldwide.
Given a complete vacuum of comparably effective politicians from either of the major parties thus far, there seems to be no reasonable path forward for the United States and the world but to swiftly repeal the 22nd Amendment, clearing a path for President Trump to extend his Presidency to a third term. President Trump’s individual achievements and abilities are so far beyond the alternatives that action is warranted for the national good. Hopefully, a third term will allow time to finally more permanently resolve worldwide hostilities under President Trump’s leadership, and finally moving the world toward a more peaceful and open future without war.
Paths to Free Elections and Congressional Term Limits
Speculation on a third term campaign by the Trump team has resulted in a number of rumors and conspiracy theories regarding how it might be achieved. One notable, but probably unrealistic, option would be for Vice President J.D. Vance to run as President with Trump as his VP. According to the ploy, on the first day of Vance’s presidency he would resign, allowing Trump to be President, at least for the additional two years allowed in the 22nd Amendment. Although clever, the plan undermines the law so severely either the American public or the courts would likely stand in the way.
If we are to repeal the 22nd Amendment, it should be done through the system as laid out by America’s founders and lawmakers. It is essential that reformers and government transparency advocates such as FBI Director Kash Patel build an adequate body of laws, rules, procedures, practices, and offices to ensure free elections, a free press, barriers to shadowy collectivist networks and conspiracies, so that neither a dictator nor a dictatorial domestic or global socialist network can over gain control of the U.S. government. The same legislation that repeals the Amendment must ensure these guardrails are in place, including limiting the number of terms in both houses of Congress.
Americans have a right to choose their President. Two is not a magic number for Presidential terms and a two-term limit was an overreaction to one specific President. Given Trump’s historic individual achievements as President, which cannot be reasonably approximated by other potential candidates and which are essential to the world’s stability, citizens, political action committees, lawmakers, and organizers must work together at breakneck speed to prepare American law for the President’s third term.
REFERENCES
Central European Institute of Asian Studies. (2025, May 19). A threat from within: Chinese espionage in Taiwan. https://ceias.eu/a-threat-from-within-chinese-espionage-in-taiwan/
Department of Homeland Security. (2025, June 22). National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin. https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-june-22-2025
Peikoff, L. (1983) Ominous Parallels. Penguin.
Rand, A. (1984) Philosophy: Who Needs It. Penguin.
The Times of Israel Staff. (2025, June 23). Liveblog: June 23, 2025. The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-june-23-2025/timesofisrael
Wilson Center. (2024, September 20). US Intel: ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, & Hezbollah. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/us-intel-isis-al-qaeda-hamas-hezbollah
Wrobleski, T. (2025, August 6). Trump gives stunning 2-word answer when asked if he’ll run for a third term. SILive. https://www.silive.com/politics/2025/08/trump-gives-stunning-2-word-answer-when-asked-if-hell-run-for-a-third-term.html
NOTES
See also: Patel, K. P. (2023). Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the truth, and the battle for our democracy. Post Hill Press.