New Delhi, July 25 -- WASHINGTON - The constitutional clock ticking against Donald Trump's third-term ambitions was built to stop a president who had never been born yet. The 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, four years after Franklin Roosevelt's death, as a direct response to a presidency no one thought possible before it happened. On Friday night, Trump pulled a hat from his jacket pocket at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and suggested, with studied ambiguity, that another impossible thing might be in the works.

"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice." The text does not ask how many terms any given president believes were taken from him.

Constitutional lawyers have examined the question o...