The uses of the 25th amendment

The mainstream media are beginning to run stories about how there are now “bipartisan” calls for removing Trump via the 25th amendment:

Democratic lawmakers and right-wing voices are expressing concerns about just how far Trump is about to take things in the Iran war, as an 8 p.m. EST deadline for Tehran to cut a deal approaches. The president’s threats to strike power plants and other civilian infrastructure have been decried as war crimes, and some even say they fear his latest comments are alluding to the use of nuclear weapons (which the White House has denied considering).

It’s mostly Democrats who are calling to invoke the amendment — more than two dozen of them, in fact. That includes potential presidential hopefuls like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. (Of course, they have little to no power at the moment to initiate removal proceedings.)

But notably, some conservatives and other recent Trump allies have taken up the call, as well.

“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” conspiracy theorist Alex Jones asked his guest on Monday’s show.

By Tuesday morning, right-leaning advocates for the step spanned from more-extreme influencers to former Trump White House official Anthony Scaramucci to more-moderate Never Trumpers.

“25TH AMENDMENT!!!” former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, posted on X about an hour after Trump’s post about Iran’s civilization dying. She called it “evil and madness.”

Some congressional Democrats re-posted Greene’s words.

“The 25th amendment needs to be invoked,” right-wing podcaster Candace Owens added later in the morning.

Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump’s communications director during his first term, advocated for Trump’s removal and claimed Trump was threatening to use nukes.

“Wake up: he is calling for A NUCLEAR STRIKE,” Scaramucci said. “Seek his removal immediately.”

When others suggested online that Vance had implied Tuesday morning that Trump could order a nuclear strike, the White House denied he was saying anything of the sort. The vice president had talked about using “tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use.”

Some Never Trump conservatives like New York Times columnist David French were also calling for the 25th Amendment.

“This is obvious 25th Amendment territory, but people are so desensitized that they can’t see it,” French said.

Others didn’t go quite so far, but have begun raising new levels of concern about Trump’s intentions.

One of them is former Trump ally Tucker Carlson, who on his show Monday criticized Trump like never before. Carlson said Trump was threatening to commit “a war crime, a moral crime” in Iran by attacking infrastructure in ways that would lead to mass death, and he even seemed to suggest Trump might be the antichrist.

Also on Tuesday, GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has been a loyal Trump ally in Congress, told the Wall Street Journal that Trump “loses me if he attacks civilian targets” like infrastructure. Johnson signaled he saw such attacks as indeed illegal.

This is still fairly thin gruel: Jones and Owens are complete lunatics themselves; Carlson is a 1930s-style anti-Semite; and MTG is now a pariah in her own party. Ron Johnson, currently in a steel-cage death match with Tommy Tuberville for title of dumbest GOP senator, is a much more interesting data point, but OTOH he’s not saying anything about supporting actual removal.

Still, this kind of thing is valuable in terms of pushing the narrative that Trump is completely out of his mind, which both happens to be true, and could potentially provide an off-ramp from this nightmare, since arguments about inherent incapacity are in some senses not as fraught as purely political/ideological arguments about what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Things of course would have to go a good deal further before either off-ramp has any viability, but the bad/good news is that things seem to be going further very rapidly.

Following up on Cheryl’s post on this topic, the belief that there’s no legal way to remove Trump from the presidency — an argument in which some people are now including the 2028 election as an example of the futility of any sort of legality — is not self-evidently correct. Things are impossible until they become possible with changing circumstances, and ruling such possibilities out is a kind of fatalistic cynicism that can become self-fulfilling.

Trump has got to go, and there’s no way to make that happen at the moment, but there could be a way, or ways (beyond traditional Roman imperial solutions and the like), sometime between now and the official end of his second term. The more talk of the 25th amendment the better, because the unthinkable has to become thinkable as a prerequisite to becoming doable.