February 3, 1816 Paul Cuffee, a shipowner and a free negro (born to slave parents in Massachusetts), arrived in Sierra Leone with 38 African Americans intent on setting up a colony for free blacks from the United States. He had earlier set up the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, a trading organization, to encourage commerce between England, the U.S. and the British colony on the Atlantic coast of Africa.
February 3, 1893 Abigail Ashbrook of Willingboro, New Jersey, refused to pay taxes because she was denied the right to vote because she was a woman.
February 3, 1964 In New York City, more than 450,000 students, mostly black and Puerto Rican, comprising nearly half the citywide enrollment, boycotted the New York City schools to protest the system’s de facto segregation. The Parents’ Workshop for Equality, led by Reverend Milton Galamison, had proposed a plan to integrate the city’s schools but it was rejected by the school board. Freedom Schools were set up for the kids during the one-day direct action.
February 3, 1973 Three decades of armed conflict in Vietnam officially ended when a cease-fire agreement signed in Paris the previous month went into effect. Vietnam had endured almost uninterrupted hostility since 1945, when a war for independence from France was launched. A civil war between the northern and southern regions of the country began after the country was divided by the Geneva Convention in 1954 following France’s military defeat and troop withdrawal. American military “advisors” began arriving in 1955. Between 1954 and 1975, 107,504 South Vietnamese government troops, approximately 1,000,000 North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front soldiers, and 58,209 American troops died in combat. The number of Vietnamese civilian deaths is unknown, estimated between one and four million killed, and millions more wounded or affected by defoliants such as Agent Orange.
February 3, 1973 President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, intended to avoid species extinction, especially through loss of habitat.
February 3, 1988 The U.S. House of Representatives rejected President Ronald Reagan’s request for at least $36.25 million in aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, an insurgent group trying violently to overthrow the Sandinista government.
February 3, 1994 President Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam, which had been in place since the end of the Vietnam war.
In the mid-1800s, Ida Lewis’s daring sea rescues became a media sensation, leading to hundreds of telegrams, gifts, and marriage proposals. All Ida wanted to do was tend to her lighthouse.
The events that led to Ida Lewis being called “The Bravest Woman in America” began on the blustery night of March 29, 1869, on Lime Rock Island, after her mother Zoradia spotted two men clinging to an overturned boat in the churning waves and screaming for help. “Ida, O my god! Ida, run quick! A boat has capsized, and men are drowning. Run quick, Ida!” she yelled to her daughter.
Ida and her younger brother Hosea immediately ran out of the house and jumped into a small skiff. Taking the icy oars, she rowed against a high wind to rescue the drowning men. Despite the freezing, wintery weather, she and Hosea lifted the choking men into the skiff, rowed them back to shore, and brought them into their home. The men were soldiers from nearby Fort Adams. As told in Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, Sergeant James Adams was barely able to “totter up to the house” and Private John McLoughlin was unconscious, but once revived and fed both recovered. Later, Sergent Adams told Ida’s other brother, Rudolph, “When I saw the boat approaching and a woman rowing, I thought She’s only a woman and she will never reach us. But I soon changed my mind.”
Illustration of Ida Lewis rescuing Sergeant James Adams and Private John McLoughlin, from the April 17, 1869, issue of Harper’s Weekly (Mariner’s Museum)
That was not the first time Ida had saved lives. By then she had already rescued three schoolboys and two other groups of men from drowning; during one rescue, Ida had saved four men whose boat had capsized in Newport Harbor. She was only twelve.
The New York Tribune’s story on Ida Lewis from their April 12, 1869 issue (Library of Congress)Illustration of Ida Lewis from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, November 1881 (Newport Historical Society)
But her rescue of 1869 was so improbable that reporters flocked to Newport to interview her. On April 12, the New York Tribunecarried Ida’s story, followed by articles in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which printed an etching of Ida’s pleasant face, strong features and wide-set hazel eyes. Adding to the story’s sensationalism was her weight of 103 pounds. Readers were riveted and soon besieged Ida with hundreds of telegrams, phone calls, gifts, and marriage proposals.
Shy and modest, Ida recoiled from the attention. When asked what motivated the rescue, she explained it as a moral obligation. “If there were some people out there who needed help, I would get into my boat and go to them even if I knew I couldn’t get back. Wouldn’t you?”
Readers were so overwhelmed by her courage that they collected funds to honor her. On July 4, 1869, in a public ceremony in Boston, they paraded a magnificent rescue boat through the streets, which was then presented to Ida. Among the audience were politicians and military leaders like Ulysses S. Grant, General Tecumseh Sherman, and Admiral George Dewey along with many wealthy Gilded Age summer residents of Newport who were then building estates along the shore. To the audience’s disappointment, she refused to address the crowd, leading prominent abolitionist Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson to explain, “Miss Lewis desires me to say that she has never made a speech in her life and…doesn’t expect to begin now.”
Later that summer, women’s rights leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton visited Newport and met Ida, whom they cited as a “young heroine” and an example of women’s unsung abilities.
Born on February 25, 1842, Idawalley Zoradia Lewis was the oldest of the four children of Zoradia and Captain Hosea Lewis of the Revenue Cutter Service, the forerunner of the U.S. Coast Guard. In 1854 after the Lighthouse Service appointed Ida’s father as keeper, young Ida routinely sailed with him from Newport to Lime Rock Island to help maintain the light. Three years later when a house was built on the island and the light relocated there in a special second floor “lanthern” room, the Lewises moved to Lime Rock. Tragedy struck four months later when Ida’s father suffered a paralytic stroke, forcing her mother Zoradia to assume his keeper duties.
Illustration of Lime Rock Island from Harper’s Weekly, July 31, 1869 (Wikimedia Commons)
By then everyone in the family knew Ida was dependable, had unusual strength, and was a skilled sailor. Her brother Rudolf bragged, “Ida… can hold one to wind’ard in a gale better than any man I ever saw, wet an oar, and yes do it too when the sea is breaking over her.” Consequently, after her father’s stroke, she rowed her siblings to school and returned to the island with supplies from Newport.
Over the next 14 years, Ida helped her mother tend the light until her father died in 1877. A year later, Zoradia, who was ill with cancer, also died, leaving Ida to serve as keeper, maintain the family home, and care for a frail sister.
Being a lighthouse keeper was demanding. It was a job traditionally done by men. The beacon came from an oil-burning lantern housed in a wooden or iron frame surrounded by thick panes of glass. A solid wick suspended from the top of the frame enabled the oil (which needed to be refilled two or three times a night) to burn through the darkness. A Fresnel lens 17 inches tall and 11 ¾ inches in diameter reflected the burning oil, its light beaming far out beyond Newport Harbor. Every evening before dusk Ida trimmed the wick and adjusted the glass vents of the lens to create a proper draft. During the day, she cleaned the delicate panes of the lens, inspected and cleaned parts of the lantern, and removed carbon and other impurities. Those duties had to be performed carefully. If not, and the beacon failed, the lives of sailors at sea could be endangered.
Since Ida never kept records, no one knows how many rescues she achieved. Besides the famous 1869 rescue, several others were well known. The first occurred on a February 1866 night when she pulled three drunken soldiers from the waters after they “borrowed” her brother’s skiff and capsized it. The second happened the next January when three farmhands herded one of tycoon August Belmont’s prize sheep down Newport’s Main Street. Unexpectedly, the animal bolted and plunged into the harbor. Panicked, the trio jumped into Ida’s brother’s skiff to capture it but then overturned the boat. Again, Ida leapt into her own skiff and saved the drowning men whose hands were so numb from the frigid water that they barely grasped the sides of the capsized hull.
In 1870 Ida was officially appointed the Lighthouse Keeper of Lime Rock and awarded a salary of $750 per year (about $17,000 today). That same year she married Captain William Heard Wilson but became so unhappy that she soon left him and returned to her duties at Lime Rock Lighthouse.
Later, she rescued two more soldiers from Fort Adams who had fallen through the ice, prompting the United States government to award her the Gold Lifesaving Medal in 1881. Decades later, in 1907, Congress bestowed the first American Cross of Honor upon the aging Ida.
But awards, even national ones, meant little to her. “The light is my child and I know when it needs me, even if I sleep,” she once said. It was only when Ida died at age 69 on October 24, 1911, that her light finally went out.
February 2, 1779 Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, both prominent Quakers (Society of Friends), urged refusal to pay taxes used for arming against Indians in Pennsylvania. Since William Penn established the state two generations earlier, the Friends had dealt with the Indian tribes nonviolently, and had been treated likewise by the native Americans. Benezet and the Quakers were also early and consistent opponents of slavery. More about Anthony Benezet
February 2, 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in the Mexican city of the same name, ending the Mexican War. In 1845 Congress had voted to annex Texas, and President James K. Polk sent General Zachary Taylor and troops to patrol the border, newly defined by Congress as the Rio Grande, though it previously had been the Nueces River. Following an encounter between Mexican and U.S. troops, Polk called for Congress to declare war on Mexico. General Winfield Scott and troops eventually seized Mexico City.The treaty’s provisions called for Mexico to cede 55% of its territory (present-day California, Nevada and Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona, and portions of New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado), and to recognize the Rio Grande as the southern border of Texas, in exchange for fifteen million dollars in compensation for war-related damage to Mexican property. According to the treaty, U.S. citizenship was offered to any Mexicans living in the 500,000 sq miles (1.3 million sq km) of new U.S. territory. Land ceded to the U.S. after the Mexican War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
February 2, 1931 The first of well over 400,000 Mexican-Americans from across the country, some of them citizens and many of them U.S. residents for as long as 40 years, were “repatriated” as Los Angeles Chicanos were forcibly deported to Mexico. More on those deported, Los Repatriados
February 2, 1932 The Conference on the Reduction and Limitation of Arms, the world’s first disarmament meeting, opened in Geneva, Switzerland. Sponsored by the League of Nations, and attended by delegates from 60 nations, no agreement was reached. The U.S. delegation called for the abolition of all offensive weapons as the basis for negotiations but found little support.
February 2, 1966 The first burning of Australian military conscription papers as a protest against the Vietnam War occurred in Sydney, Australia.
February 2, 1970 Bertrand Russell later in life Bertrand Russell, mathematician, Nobel laureate in literature and philosopher of peace, died in Penryndeudreaeth, Merioneth, in Wales at age 97. Bertrand Russell at age 10 “Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.” — Bertrand Russell More of Russell’s wisdom
February 2, 1980 Reports surfaced that the FBI had conducted a sting operation targeting members of Congress. In what became known as ”Abscam,” members suspected of taking bribes were invited to meetings with FBI agents posing as Arab businessmen, offering $50,000 and $100,000 payments for special legislation. Audio and video recordings of the meetings were made surreptitiously. Six members of the house were convicted of accepting bribes. Another member of the House and one senator were targeted but took no money. FBI agents in Abscam sting operation Actual FBI videotape of one attempted scam
February 2, 1989 Soviet participation in the war in Afghanistan ended as Red Army troops withdrew from the capital city of Kabul. They left behind many of their arms for use by Afghan government forces. They were driven out principally by the insurgent mujahadin, armed through covert U.S. funding. Read more “Charlie Wilson’s War” movie trailer
February 2, 1990 South African President F.W. De Klerk unbanned (lifted the legal prohibition on) opposition parties: the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan-Africanist Congress and the South African Communist party were officially considered legal. He also announced the lifting of restrictions on the UDF, COSATU and thirty-three other anti-apartheid organizations, as well as the release of all political prisoners and the suspension of the death penalty. This was the result of his negotiations with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, a leader of the ANC. The ecstatic reaction to De Klerk’s beginning the end of apartheid on BBC video
Women’s entry into public life around the turn of the twentieth century was a major catalyst for the creation of sex-segregated public restrooms. As scholar Daphne Spain writes, female civic reformers lobbied municipal governments to make cities more inclusive places for women, pushing for amenities such as health clinics and kindergartens. And in both small towns and big cities, notes historian Peter C. Baldwin, women worked to ensure the availability of public toilets. The first gender-segregated public bathrooms afforded women privacy, safety, and autonomy—if, that is, the women were white and of means; otherwise, access to bathrooms served as a tool of segregation. The history of the women’s bathrooms in the United States is a story of who does—and who doesn’t—get to belong in public life.
The first public bathrooms in the United States appeared in the late 1800s. Pub owners offered them to paying customers to drum up business and keep drinkers drinking. But, as Baldwin notes, pubs and saloons were improper, unwelcoming, and sometimes dangerous environments for women, and were effectively male-only establishments whose facilities only catered to men.
Just a few decades later, according to Spain, women had begun to challenge their “proper place” in society. While middle- and upper-class women increasingly ventured out of the home into the burgeoning urban environment to shop and to socialize, their lower-class counterparts increasingly found work in factories and other non-domestic environments where they could earn their own money. And some, many of whom belonged to the upper classes, forced their way into political and civic life, lobbying for, and winning, suffrage. Changing social stations pushed women and men together in public. They shared sidewalks, transportation, parks, stores, and restaurants. Women entered public life, and standards of decorum shifted to accommodate them, though certainly not to include them—gender segregation became a paramount concern, according to Baldwin, for preserving the modesty and propriety of women. Still, a dramatic shift had occurred: Men no longer wielded a monopoly on public life.
In the absence of an available pub bathroom, men were accustomed to relieving themselves in the street. Not only did that suddenly seem crass in mixed company, but the new science of germ theory made it clear that using the city as a toilet posed a health hazard, Baldwin says. Urban designers, physicians, and civic groups lobbied municipal governments in Chicago, Boston, New York, and elsewhere to provide a sanitary solution to the problem of human waste.
The first public toilets, euphemistically called “comfort stations,” appeared in American cities in the 1890s, according to Baldwin. By 1919, roughly one hundred cities, including Denver, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Seattle made toilet facilities available to the public for free or a small fee. Some were funded by health-minded philanthropists and reformers concerned not only with physical cleanliness, but “moral cleanliness,” writes sociologist Alexander K. Davis. They believed the two were intrinsically linked.
Comfort stations were gender segregated but not gender equal. While men were afforded the opportunity to take care of their most basic needs—the need to relieve themselves—women were not given the same. Women’s facilities were often smaller and had fewer toilets than the men’s, writes Baldwin, and were consistently inferior to the semi-private “customers only” bathrooms available in the “Adamless Eden” of a department store, as one such store owner Spain quotes called them; these were available only to patrons.
For those women denied the privilege of department store entry owing to race or lack of means, the comfort station was the only option for getting some privacy in public. Businesses, manufacturing plants, offices, and government buildings almost entirely lacked gender-segregated bathrooms, and because it was scandalous for a woman to enter a bathroom that men used, the lack of women’s toilets sent a clear signal about who was and wasn’t welcome in a particular space. Without equitable access, women were not able to fully participate in life outside the home. If you can’t empty your bladder or your bowels with dignity, it’s hard to be away from home for long.
Public stations were expensive to maintain and quickly became dirty and malodorous. Many were underground or in secluded areas and were dangerous for female users. Baldwin points out that by the early 1920s, cities cut budgets and patrons abandoned the cause, so stations fell into disrepair almost as soon as they appeared, and some of the same women’s groups that had petitioned for their creation eventually pressed for their closure. The provision of bathrooms became largely the remit of private business owners who could provide or restrict access as they pleased.
Women’s restroom at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, AZ, 1930s via Wikimedia Commons
Though the truly public bathroom—where access is free to all—is increasingly rare today, the semi-public toilet is taken for granted. The ladies’ room in restaurants, bars, airports, train and bus stations, hotel lobbies, schools, and event venues remains one of the few spaces where men are strictly prohibited. Though many are accessible only to those who can patronize a business or afford a ticket for travel.
It’s such an important part of female culture that the women’s bathroom is a convenient prop in movies, TV, and books. Writers set a scene in the ladies’ room, where women gather to complain, cry, confide, confess, gossip, preen, or bully. And though such scenes sometimes lean on tired tropes of female behavior, the gender-segregated bathroom is a place to exist beyond the gaze and reach of men. Here, women speak candidly about feelings, bodies, periods, sex, romantic partners, friends, jobs, and family.
“They offer a space for bonding, the exchange of information, and personal recovery,” writes scholar Christine Overall. “Sex-segregated toilets provide ‘the element of sociability important to many women, who also use the women’s room as a refuge, ‘a place to feel safe, both physically safe but also psychologically safe.’” On the wall and in stalls, it’s not uncommon to see phone numbers for domestic violence helplines or, in bar bathrooms, instructions for ordering an “angel shot”: a coded way to ask a bartender for help in the face of harassment.
Of course, the ladies’ room by design isn’t a safe space for all women.
“At various points in US history, the absence of toilet facilities has signaled to [B]lacks, to women, to workers, to people with disabilities, to transgender people, and to homeless people that they are outsiders to the body politic and that there is no room for them in public space,” writes the feminist scholar Judith Plaskow. If these bathrooms are supposedly for the public, then by virtue of excluding certain people, the message is that their needs are not for consideration.
Access to public space in the US has even been explicitly exclusionary. When the Boston-based advocacy organization Women’s Educational and Industrial Union pressed for the creation of health clinics and lunch rooms in the early twentieth century, it made it clear that their goal was to segregate classes and create spaces, Spain explains, where only “middle-class and elite women could appear without being declassed and working women could appear in public without having their virtue questioned by being ‘on the streets.’”
In the Jim Crow south, writes Baldwin, Black women had to use separate bathrooms, typically older and poorly maintained, and were not afforded the privacy of gender-segregated facilities. In some cases, Black people in the segregated South had no access to public bathrooms at all.
Now, the current campaigns of exclusion seek to bar transgender women from accessing the ladies’ room. In 2016, the North Carolina state legislature passed “the bathroom bill,” which forced people to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth. The next year, eight more states moved to impose similar restrictions. North Carolina’s bill was met with such anger on behalf of the LGBTQ community that some elements were quickly scrapped, and the remainder was left to lapse in 2020. While campaigns for equity have made such laws and restrictions exceedingly unpopular, they have not yet made them extinct.
My country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Would I could sing; Its land of Pilgrim’s pride Also where lynched men died With such upon her tide, Freedom can’t reign.
My native country, thee The world pronounce you free Thy name I love; But when the lynchers rise To slaughter human lives Thou closest up thine eyes, Thy God’s above.
Let Negroes smell the breeze So they can sing with ease Sweet freedom’s song; Let justice reign supreme, Let men be what they seem Break up that lyncher’s screen, Lay down all wrong.
Our fathers’ God, to Thee, Author of liberty, To Thee we sing; How can our land be bright? Can lynching be a light? Protect us by thy might, Great God our king!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
As always, click the title to get more about the poet and their work.Today’s background is especially poignant, and work the click.
Ok the first few minutes are sort of campy and over the top, it is the guy’s style thing I guess. But then he settles down and delivers the facts and debunks a lot of stuff by showing the actual studies the right wrong claim back them up, but he shows how the studies say the opposite of that the trans haters claimed. Great info on trans people and the made up faked outrage caused by a small group of trans haters who are making big money off of pushing lies about trans kids and trans issues. Hugs
Hi. Right-wing politicians, lawyers, and grifters (and some liberals) want to convince you that trans youth are the victims of a social contagion and that the majority of those who transition will detransition. This is a lie that puts all trans people at risk. Get the world’s news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link.
Illustration by Erin Aulov/POLITICO (source image via Getty)
By James Romoser James Romoser is POLITICO’s legal editor.
Less than two weeks have passed since the last presidential inauguration, but try to imagine the next one.
It’s Jan. 20, 2029. The nation has weathered another tumultuous four years under Donald Trump. Democrats are desperate for the Trump era, at long last, to be over. Republicans have relished it.
Now, imagine this: The chief justice begins to deliver the oath of office. The next president raises his right hand and says:
“I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear…”
It’s the stuff of liberal nightmares and MAGA dreams: a third Trump term.
But it can’t happen, right? After all, the Constitution imposes an explicit two-term limit on the presidency — even if those two terms, like Trump’s, are non-consecutive. “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” the 22nd Amendment mandates.
Even Trump, notorious for bending norms and breaking laws, couldn’t possibly circumvent that clear constitutional stricture, right?
Don’t be so sure.
Around the globe, when rulers consolidate power through a cult of personality, they do not tend to surrender it willingly, even in the face of constitutional limits. And Trump, of course, already has a track record of trying to remain in office beyond his lawful tenure.
“Anyone who says that obviously the 22nd Amendment will deter Trump from trying for a third term has been living on a different planet than the one I’ve been living on,” says Ian Bassin, who was an associate White House counsel for President Barack Obama and is now the executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Protect Democracy.
If Trump decided he wanted to hold onto power past 2028, there are at least four paths he could try:
He could generate a movement to repeal the 22nd Amendment directly.
He could exploit a little-noticed loophole in the amendment that might allow him to run for vice president and then immediately ascend back to the presidency.
He could run for president again on the bet that a pliant Supreme Court won’t stop him.
Or he could simply refuse to leave — and put a formal end to America’s democratic experiment.
Each path would face serious political, legal and practical impediments. But the prospect of a third Trump term shouldn’t be dismissed with a hand wave.
Trump, after all, is definitely not dismissing the prospect. He’s been openly floating it for years.
In August 2020, he told supporters: “We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years.”
On Nov. 13, 2024, a week after winning his second term, he told House Republicans: “I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out.’”
And just last weekend, he said: “It will be the greatest honor of my life to serve not once but twice — or three or four times,” before quickly adding, “Nah, it will be to serve twice.”
Perhaps it’s all just a big joke to Trump. Perhaps he’s baiting the media. But the fact that he keeps talking about it shows that it’s on his mind. It’s time to take the prospect literally — and seriously.
Why Trump Might Do It
There are a couple of threshold objections to this thought experiment, and they’re not constitutional but physical and psychological: Would Trump, who will be 82 at the end of his second term, be healthy and fit enough to serve a third? And if so, would he even want one?
Maybe. But if he has the capacity to continue in office, Trump might have strong incentives to try to retain the powers and privileges of the presidency.
Consider a key reason he ran in 2024: the desire to elude his criminal cases. That strategy worked. The two federal cases against him had to be shut down after his victory due to the Justice Department’s longstanding position that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. His election further doomed the already faltering case against him in Georgia as well. And in the New York hush money case, the only one of the four to reach trial and result in a conviction, Trump’s victory ensured that he got away with a sentence of “unconditional discharge” — even less than a slap on the wrist.
Still, Trump may not be entirely free of all his legal problems at the end of his second term. When special counsel Jack Smith reluctantly dismissed his federal charges against Trump last month, he explicitly reserved the ability for a future Justice Department to revive and refile the charges after Trump leaves office. If a Democrat seems well positioned to win the 2028 election, Trump may fear that those charges might come back to life.
And who knows what Trump might do in the next four years that could trigger new criminal liability? The Supreme Court’s sweeping immunity decision last year would be an obstacle to charging him for anything he does while president, but it wouldn’t be an insurmountable one. If there are serious calls to prosecute Trump again after his second term, it is not hard to imagine him concluding that the best way to stave off those efforts is to simply remain president.
Aside from using the office as a legal force field, Trump may be propelled by another, more basic motive: raw power. This is the raison d’etre for autocratically minded leaders around the world, especially those who erode democratic institutions and engage in quasi-messianic rhetoric.
“Presidents tend to like their jobs, and there have been many attempts for them to overstay,” says Mila Versteeg, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
Versteeg co-authored a 2020 study that examined 234 heads of state in 106 countries in the 21st century. She found that one-third of them sought to circumvent legally imposed term limits. Many of them succeeded — typically not by directly disobeying the law, but rather by exploiting gaps and weaknesses in their constitutional systems or by convincing meek courts to bless their consolidation of power.
“In the countries where this has happened, the rule of law is much weaker than in the United States,” Versteeg says. “But we shouldn’t dismiss it as impossible or unimaginable. It has happened around the world.”
How Trump Might Do It
Assuming Trump wanted to make it happen here, could he succeed?
At first blush, the 22nd Amendment appears to be an absolute barrier. It was ratified in 1951 in response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four-term presidency. Before Roosevelt, no president had ever run for reelection after serving two terms — a norm that dated back to George Washington.
Critically for Trump’s purposes, the amendment is not restricted to consecutive terms. Virtually every constitutional scholar agrees that the two-term limit applies to any two terms by a single person, even if those terms are not back-to-back.
But that is not the end of the matter. The rules in the Constitution are only as durable as the institutions that preserve and protect them. And Trump could chip away at them, or even try to defy them completely, through both legal and extralegal means. He is already seeking to transform the birthright citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment. Is there any reason to think he wouldn’t try something similar with the term limits provision of the 22nd?
Here are four things he could try.
Option 1
Change the Constitution
The most obvious route would be for Trump to persuade Americans to simply repeal the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit. It’s perfectly permissible to repeal an amendment: We’ve already done it before, when we repealed the 18th Amendment’s prohibition on the sale of alcohol.
A formal repeal, though, would require a landslide of popular support that is far-fetched in today’s polarized nation. Two-thirds of both chambers of Congress would have to propose a new amendment, or two-thirds of the states would have to call for a constitutional convention to propose one. Then three-fourths of the states would have to ratify the proposed amendment. Even if Trump remains popular among Republicans, it’s hard to imagine him garnering the supermajorities needed.
And The American Conservative began laying the groundwork for the idea even before Trump won last year. Back in March, it published a piece arguing that, if Trump were to secure a second term, the 22nd Amendment should be repealed to allow him to seek a third.
“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?” wrote Peter Tonguette, a contributing editor at the magazine.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, are not taking any chances. Rep. Dan Goldman of New York proposed a resolution last fall reiterating that the 22nd Amendment applies to non-consecutive terms.
And a few blue states are trying to revoke their long-dormant requests for a constitutional convention. They fear Republicans could use those requests — which in some cases were made decades or even centuries ago — to trigger a convention and propose a slew of unpredictable amendments. One prominent Trump ally in Congress, House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington of Texas, believes the required threshold — requests from two-thirds of the states — has already been met to spark a convention.
Trump himself has not explicitly endorsed an amendment push. But on Monday, he shared a social media post from Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick lauding Trump’s first week in office. “People are already talking about changing the 22nd Amendment so he can serve a third term,” Patrick wrote. “If this pace and success keeps up for 4 years, and there is no reason it won’t, most Americans really won’t want him to leave.”
Option 2
Sidestep the Constitution
If formally amending the two-term limit is off the table, another option is to find a loophole. As it turns out, the 22nd Amendment has a big one.
The text bars anyone from being “elected” to a third presidential term. It says nothing about a person becoming president for a third term by some other legal avenue — for instance, by being elected vice president and then ascending back to the presidency through the death, resignation or removal of the person at the top of the ticket.
This technicality seems to permit a shrewd scenario. Imagine that, near the end of Trump’s second term, some other person — call him JD Vance — wins the Republican nomination for 2028. Vance chooses Trump as his vice-presidential running mate — and pledges that, if he wins, he will resign on Day 1 and hand the presidency back to Trump.
The campaign slogan writes itself: “Vote Vance to Make Trump President Again.”
It might seem like a far-fetched parlor trick. Or it could be seen as the most artful deal Trump ever struck. Either way, if it’s 2028 and Trump retains the grip on the Republican Party that he had in 2016, 2020 and 2024, it is not hard to picture the idea gaining traction. And if Vance wouldn’t agree to cooperate, Trump could find some other lackey who would.
The gambit, of course, would carry some risk to Trump. He would have to trust Vance or his hand-picked placeholder to follow through on the promise to step down from the presidency immediately and allow Trump to re-ascend to the office. In theory, that person could renege on the deal after the election and keep the presidency. But if the ticket had run on an explicit pledge that Trump would be the one in the Oval Office, the political pressure to honor the deal (and honor the will of the voters) would be enormous. And if Vance or some other politician wants a future in the GOP and a real shot at the White House in the future, maintaining support from Trump would be paramount.
Trump, who revels in public expressions of fealty from his subordinates, might find the whole arrangement enticing.
“It would not be surprising — if the president were interested in the presidency again — that he would seek to go down this path,” says Bruce Peabody, a law professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Peabody foreshadowed the possibility long before Trump emerged on the political scene. In a 1999 law review article (and in a 2016 follow-up), he explored the potential for a twice-elected president to serve in other high-ranking government roles that might allow them to become president again. Peabody concluded that the scenario is not only constitutional, but politically plausible.
You might even call it the Putin-Medvedev scenario. When, in 2008, term limits barred Putin from continuing to rule Russia, he served for a time as “prime minister” under President Dmitry Medvedev. Of course, Putin continued to pull the strings, and he eventually returned to power formally.
Here in the U.S., a different part of the Constitution arguably complicates the loophole. The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, says that no one “constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice President.” So if Trump were disqualified from serving a third presidential term under the 22nd Amendment, then he also wouldn’t seem to be eligible to become vice president under the 12th — and in that case, the loophole wouldn’t work.
But that’s just the thing: The 22nd Amendment doesn’t say Trump would be ineligible to serve as president for a third term. It just says he is ineligible to run for a third term (or, more precisely, to be elected to a third term). So the 12th Amendment’s eligibility provision doesn’t seem to foreclose Trump using the loophole.
“You could make a case that it’s pretty clear that a twice-elected president is still eligible,” Peabody says. “You could also make a case that it’s murky. But I don’t find the argument terribly convincing that it’s a slam dunk that he isn’t eligible.”
Option 3
Ignore the Constitution
If the first two options are too difficult or too convoluted, Trump could try something even bolder, and far more Trumpian. He could simply run for a third term and see if anyone stops him.
The question of who would do so, and how, is surprisingly difficult. Would the Republican National Committee block him from seeking the party’s nomination for 2028? Surely not, if he still dominates the GOP. Would states refuse to put him on their ballots? Some certainly would, but that would spark litigation. The issue would then wind up at the Supreme Court — a court that is already quite sympathetic to Trump’s interests and, in four years, may be populated with even more Trump appointees than it has today.
Still, would the high court really green-light a flagrant violation of the 22nd Amendment? It sounds implausible now, even for this very conservative court. But it’s important to consider the context in which such a case would be heard.
It would be the middle of the 2028 election season. Trump would be out on the campaign trail, acting like a candidate, insisting he is running again for the good of the country. The RNC would have proudly proclaimed him its nominee. Imagine half of Americans continue to support him unconditionally.
It does not take a Supreme Court cynic to see that, in such a climate, declaring Trump ineligible to run would take immense political courage from the justices.
“All you need is a court that is willing to be your faithful helper,” Versteeg says, adding that she believes it’s unlikely — though not impossible — that the current court would fall in line for Trump.
Bassin, of Protect Democracy, is more blunt.
“The court’s gonna tell the Republican Party that they can’t run their candidate?” he asks. “I don’t think so.”
In fact, the country and the court have already experienced a similar conundrum.
Many legal scholars believe Trump was constitutionally ineligible to run in 2024 because the 14th Amendment bars anyone from holding federal office if they previously engaged in an insurrection. But when Colorado sought to enforce that provision, citing Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, and removed Trump from its ballot, the Supreme Court swiftly stepped in. Only Congress, not states, can enforce the insurrection ban, the court declared — even though the 14th Amendment itself contains no such limitation.
That ruling was widely seen as being at least partially results-driven: Whatever the legal arguments, the justices simply were never going to let individual states kick the leading Republican candidate off their ballots. The same calculus might apply if Trump tried to run again in 2028.
One might respond that the 22nd Amendment’s command (“No person shall be elected” as president “more than twice”) is far clearer than the 14th Amendment’s abstruse language about insurrections. But litigation has a way of muddying even the most crystal-clear language, and pro-Trump lawyers will have plenty of opportunities to make the two-term limit seem ambiguous.
Perhaps they’ll find some originalist argument for why the two-term limit doesn’t mean what it seems.
Perhaps they’ll find some reason that the amendment’s ratification was procedurally improper. Versteeg points out that such procedural arguments are common tactics to erode constitutional term limits abroad.
Or perhaps they’ll argue that some other, more fundamental provision of the Constitution supersedes the 22nd Amendment’s term limit. For instance, maybe Trump has a due process right to run for president, or maybe voters have a due process right to vote for their preferred candidate, regardless of what the 22nd Amendment says.
None of these arguments is legally strong. Virtually all constitutional scholars would reject them today. But simply by advancing the arguments in court, and in the public sphere, Trump’s lawyers can make the issue seem debatable. And, as the legal scholar Jack Balkin has shown, that process of normalization can transform outlandish constitutional claims into formal doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court.
Option 4
Defy the Constitution
There is one final way Trump could try to hold onto power. This last option would not involve amending the Constitution. It would not require a deal with a running mate willing to hand the presidency back to Trump using a technicality. It would not even require Trump to go through the trouble of running again.
He could simply refuse to leave office.
It’s hard to predict what that would look like (though Trump’s attempts to cling to power after the 2020 election might offer some clues). One obvious move in the autocrat’s playbook is to cancel an election by declaring some sort of national emergency. The president, of course, has no legal authority to call off or postpone elections, but that doesn’t mean Trump wouldn’t try it anyway — perhaps by seizing on a natural disaster or even starting a war. Alternatively, perhaps Trump would allow the 2028 election to take place with other candidates but declare the outcome rigged and decide to stay in power himself.
The last time Trump tried to cling to the presidency, he used lies about election fraud to undermine the 2020 results and then encouraged his supporters to go “wild” in Washington the day his defeat was certified. Four years from now, could he pursue a power grab even more brazen and lawless? It’s an extraordinary thing to contemplate. And scholars of authoritarianism point out that, when norms like term limits die, the culprit is usually not a single and obvious coup. Rather, the erosion happens slowly, often with the acquiescence of people and institutions within the constitutional system.
On Jan. 20, 2021, after his myriad efforts to overthrow Joe Biden’s victory failed, Trump did leave office. Power was transferred, and the nation’s democratic institutions survived.
If he threatens the transfer of power again, there is no guarantee American democracy will survive again.
One thing, though, is clear: The words of the 22nd Amendment alone will not be enough.
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