Peter Baker for the NYT:

After President Trump said last year that he wanted to be a dictator for a day, he insisted that he was only joking. Now he is saying that he may try to hold onto power even after the Constitution stipulates that he must give it up, and this time he insists he is not joking.

Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. Mr. Trump loves stirring the pot and getting a rise out of critics. Talk of an unconstitutional third term distracts from other news and delays the day he is seen as a lame duck. Certainly some in his own camp consider it a joke as Republican leaders laugh it off and White House aides mock reporters for taking it too seriously.

But the fact that Mr. Trump has inserted the idea into the national conversation illustrates the uncertainty about the future of America’s constitutional system, nearly 250 years after the country gained independence. More than at any time in generations, a president’s commitment to limits on power and the rule of law is under question and his critics fear that the country is on a dark path.

After all, Mr. Trump already tried once to hold onto power in defiance of the Constitution when he sought to overturn the 2020 election despite losing. He later called for “termination” of the Constitution to return himself to the White House without a new election. And in the 11 weeks since he resumed office, he has pressed the boundaries of executive power more than any of his modern predecessors….

To Mr. Trump’s allies, such talk is hyperbolic, the over-the-top grievances of an opposition party that lost an election and cannot come to terms with it. Mr. Trump, who is 78, is not really going to run for a third term, they maintain, and even if he found a way around the Constitution, it would still be up to voters to decide whether to re-elect him.

While his allies contend that Mr. Trump is not serious, he has a way of throwing out ideas that seem outrageous at first, only to socialize them over time through repetition until they are treated as if they are somehow normal or at least no longer quite so shocking. There was a time it would have been unthinkable for a president to threaten to seize Greenland and Canada or to pardon rioters who stormed the Capitol to stop the transfer of power and beat police officers. But in the Trump era, the journey from unthinkable to reality has been remarkably short.

Mr. Trump’s autocratic tendencies and disregard for constitutional norms are well documented. In this second term alone, he has already sought to overrule birthright citizenship embedded in the 14th Amendment, effectively co-opted the power of Congress to determine what money will be spent or agencies closed, purged the uniformed leadership of the armed forces to enforce greater personal loyalty and punished dissent in academia, the news media, the legal profession and the federal bureaucracy.