Only one person in U.S. history has defied the two-term example set by the first president, George Washington. And voters responded by forbidding future presidents from being elected more than twice. President Donald Trump has alluded to arcane legal arguments in repeatedly suggesting he could seek a third term. Besides challenging long-settled readings of the U.S. Constitution, a Trump move to run in 2028 would challenge the precedent that voters have repeatedly upheld when given the opportunity. Here is an explanation of the historical and legal tradition behind the presidency being a job for a maximum of two terms and two terms only. Washington set the example of voluntary limits It seemed a foregone conclusion that Washington, president of the 1787 convention that yielded the U.S. Constitution, also would become the nation’s first federal executive, even as anti-federalists worried that he’d be reelected again and again, becoming a quasi-king by acclamation. Washington began his presidency in 1789, leading an executive branch of government that the Constitution’s authors balanced with two others: Congress and the judiciary. Besides those structural guards against concentrations of power, Washington put aside his military garb and title, opting for the era’s formal attire and the honorific of “Mr. President” to underscore his status as an elected civilian. He considered not standing for reelection. He even had James Madison draft a farewell address before ultimately seeking and winning another term in 1792. Four years later, he tasked Alexander Hamilton with dusting off and polishing up Madison’s farewell draft as he announced his retirement from public life. There was no legal barrier to a third Washington term. But his decision set the tone. Four of the next six presidents won a second term but passed on a third. The last of that group, Andrew Jackson, was the first president not to have worked with Washington or have known him. Yet by the time Jackson endorsed his own successor, Martin Van Buren, two terms had become the standard. A few pushed against the Washington rule – and failed Historians have debated whether Abraham Lincoln might have pursued a third term after the Civil War had he not been assassinated in 1865 at the outset of his second term. Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln’s victorious Civil War general and president from 1869 to 1877, led Republican delegates’ initial voting at their 1880 convention. But he could not win a majority. Theodore Roosevelt, elected vice president in 1901, served nearly a full presidential term after William McKinley’s death in 1901. When Roosevelt was elected in his own right in 1904, he promised he would not run for what he called a third term. Delegates at the 1908 GOP convention chanted “four more years,” but Roosevelt kept his word. He backtracked in 1912 but lost the nomination to his successor, incumbent William Howard Taft. Roosevelt launched a failed third-party campaign and lost, pilloried by critics for his broken third-term promise. One scathing political cartoon depicted the ghost of George Washington chiding Roosevelt. FDR used World War II to win additional terms In 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the only president to successfully win a third election, doing so as World War II raged in Europe ahead of the eventual U.S. entry. Biographer H.W. Brands reasoned that FDR saw the global conflict as a “chance to write his name in bold letters […]