SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
25th amendment
Stop Waiting on the 25th Amendment to Save Us From Trump
Trump is not in office despite being out of his fucking mind—he occupies the seat of supreme power precisely because he is off the charts berserk and the only people who matter in the Crumbling States of America are making bank on it.
Jun 08, 2026
In a famous fable a group of mice discuss the catastrophic death toll from the local cat. One mouse has an epiphany—“We simply have to put a collar with a bell on the cat, and we’ll be warned every time she draws near.” The mice erupt in celebration. But suddenly one doleful rodent interrupts the celebrants with a shy question: "Who’s going to bell the cat?"
As an avid reader of lefty alternative media essays, I would venture that “bell the cat” polemics have become a prominent strategy employed by far too many writers. We bell cats in our daydreams, and then write about it with a triumphant brushing of the hands. How many pieces have we all read that call for removing President Donald Trump via the 25th Amendment?
I, personally, am easily convinced that Donald J Trump is... uh... unfit. His twitchy little evil finger on the so-called nuclear button defines a new plateau of dystopian absurdity that no past writer of dark fiction could have ever imagined. Do we need to clarify just how close to the stroke of doomsday this vapid monster brings us daily? His genocidal intent; his criminal impulses; his senseless drivel; his delusional narcissism; his racism; his sexism; and his urge to brag, attack, and threaten ought to make him a prime candidate for a golden sunset behind bars.
Most of the calls for the 25th Amendment rather coalesce around the aesthetics of Trump’s alleged mental decline—his malapropisms; his stumbling gait; his ridiculous boasting about “acing” a dementia screening exam; his late-night posting binges of misspelled, all-caps incoherent rage; his nodding off to sleep in meetings; and the sheer sight of his grotesque, sneering, confused, melting jowls seem to be enough of an argument.
In the Numbed States of America we have gravely limited capacity to respond to extinction threats. Some atavistic fantasy of reprieve keeps people mutely indoors.
Some calls for the 25th Amendment solution merely focus on Trump’s dwindling physical health—his mysterious hospital visits; his bruises; his enormously swollen ankles; his tiny eye slits peering in a senile, comatose manner from the drooping folds of a face that precariously hovers somewhere between a living visage and a death mask.
It seems odd, however, to argue that Trump ought to be seen as a broken shell of a man, eaten from the inside by diseases associated with aging. Do we really want him removed from office because of illness, or because he has spearheaded an assault against the environment, a new age of unregulated capitalist plunder, a total commitment to eviscerate human rights, and the intent to wage war as a matter of reflexive masculinist expression? Where have US bombs fallen, and where will they imminently rain down on hapless civilians?
Are Mogadishu and Copenhagen on the list? Havana? Have we blown Cuba up yet, or is that just a coming attraction scheduled for August or November? Donald J Trump’s trembling, tiny phallic finger nuzzling the button of eternal extinction seems like a surefire image to summon massive levels of public panic, to send hysterical crowds into the streets as if the Chicxulub Meteor had been scheduled for an encore. But in the Numbed States of America we have gravely limited capacity to respond to extinction threats. Some atavistic fantasy of reprieve keeps people mutely indoors. We have guardrails, constitutional guarantees—like the oft mentioned 25th Amendment. Why go crazy in an existential panic, when the Constitution has our back?
The 25th Amendment is not some hoary remnant of our overly esteemed Founding Fathers. No such Revolutionary War icons stared wisely into the crystal ball of future contingencies, and asked the question, “What do we do when a batshit lunatic captures the presidency?” No, the Founding Fathers had not imagined a president as being anything other than a generic advocate for the interests of the wealthy—a role that carried an implicit assumption of sanity in their constitutional eyes. The 25th Amendment was passed by congress in 1965, and ratified in 1967, perhaps inspired by the unraveling, warmongering man of the moment, Lyndon Baines Johnson. But more likely, the amendment shuffled itself into the Constitution as a matter of legislative busywork, a footnote barely acknowledged at the time. The 25th gives some clarity as to when the vice president steps into a presidential role, usually for a day or two when a presidential colonoscopy creates a window of momentary confusion. Congress voted on the amendment only two years after JFK’s assassination—fearful politicians had, one imagines, a lurking sense of unpredictable events.
The 25th Amendment, however, also creates a new protocol for the permanent removal of an unfit president—the vice-president along with the members of the Cabinet must vote to toss the leader out of office with a simple majority. From there, the decision to remove an unfit president passes to both houses of Congress where a two-thirds majority of each chamber must vote to remove the spiraling executive. In other words (at least in Trump’s case), a collection of morally deformed misfits must pool their distaste for the unravelling psychopath who appointed them. And then a collection of party sycophants must rise up against the leader who fills their trembling hearts with utter terror.
Maybe you believe that Trump should be removed because he is: 1) corrupt, 2) demented, 3) insane, 4) stupid, and 5) evil. Obviously, while all of these allegations rest on mountains of evidence; none of it resonates with a single cabinet member. The 25th Amendment is not a public plebiscite. You and I might easily agree that tearing up the White House to build a ballroom-bomb-shelter for a nuclear fetishizing war criminal might be an awful idea. But so what? The 25th Amendment is a private matter, a means of protection for the ruling class. If a president goes cuckoo for coco-puffs, the oligarchs can set things right. One might aptly assume that none of Trump’s shenanigans trouble the billionaire class.
So you and I do not get a vote according to 25th Amendment protocol. Here is an abbreviated list of those authorized to vote: 1) RFK Jr., 2) Linda McMahon, 3) Howard Lutnick, 4) Doug Burgum, 5) Chris Wright, 6) Pete Hegseth, 7) Marco Rubio... and so forth. If you believe that any of these names might vote to remove Trump, I suggest that you hurry (if you still have medical insurance) to take The Montreal Cognitive Assessment.
Trump is not in office despite being out of his fucking mind—he occupies the seat of supreme power precisely because he is off the charts berserk. The only people who matter in the Crumbling States of America make bank on Trump’s presidency. The oil executives, nuclear weapons manufacturers, planet destroying Big Tech moguls, insurance profiteers, and chemical poisoners are carving up the Earth like famished vultures alighting on a putrid carcass. If these predators don’t care about Trump’s decaying brain, it really doesn’t matter what you and I believe.
There is a means of removal—a real one, not a self-indulgent fantasy. It is called The 3.5% Rule, a theory that argues that regime change requires massive resistance involving 3.5% of the population taking to the streets until a resolution has been reached. It involves daily mobilization, not a two hour street festival every two months. In the US that means at least 11 million angry, undeterred resistors willing to endure a measure of personal inconvenience. It involves blocking traffic, getting arrested, boycotts, strikes, and international connections. We should be calling for foreign nationals to boycott and divest from US corporations. Or we can day dream about the 25th Amendment until Trump dies and hands over the throne to JD Vance.
As a general theme, we US citizens have far too much faith in alleged democratic process, and far too little passion for collective agency.
Keep ReadingShow Less
We Can't Rely on Impeachment Or the 25th Amendment to Save Us From Trump's Chaos
Instead of looking for a magic bullet in the Constitution to bring Trump down, progressives and anti-Trumpers should concentrate on building a lasting, broad-based, and genuine pro-democracy movement.
Apr 19, 2026
The United States Constitution provides two paths for removing a sitting president from office: impeachment and the procedures outlined in the 25th Amendment. Both approaches are being raised again, and with increasing fervor, as ways to bring an early end to Donald Trump’s second term of chaos, incompetence, and corruption. Both are clearly warranted, but structural hurdles built into both render them legally infeasible.
Instead of looking for a magic bullet in the Constitution to bring Trump down, progressives and anti-Trumpers should concentrate on building a lasting, broad-based, and genuine pro-democracy movement. Impeachment hearings and calls for invoking the 25th can play a role in that process, but only an ancillary one.
Here’s why.
Impeachment
The Founding Fathers were well aware of the dangers of unbridled one-man rule. Along with removing the yoke of King George III, they sought to prevent the rise of homegrown tyrants driven by ambition, greed, and vanity.
In a rational country with leaders committed to the rule of law, the resolution would swiftly lead to Trump’s demise. But we are not that country today.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after prolonged debate about the extent of presidential powers and whether the new federal charter should include a provision authorizing the impeachment and removal of the president, the delegates adopted the now-famous clause inscribed in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution that provides, “The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
To strike a balance between a strong chief executive and what the antifederalists dreaded would eventually devolve into monarchy, they created a two-step process for impeachment. As set forth in Article I of the Constitution, the House of Representatives holds the sole power of impeachment, akin to a grand jury’s authority to return an indictment against a criminal defendant. A simple majority vote is all that is needed to accuse federal officers of committing an impeachable act and send their cases to the Senate, which is given the sole power to try cases of impeachment. In the upper chamber, however, a two-thirds vote (67 senators today if all are present) is needed to sustain a guilty verdict and remove a defendant from office.
As it was designed to do, the two-thirds requirement has drastically curtailed the frequency and impact of impeachment. Including Trump, only 21 federal officials have been impeached in our history. Fifteen were judges, two were Cabinet members, and one was a senator. The other three were presidents—Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Trump in 2019 and 2021. All were acquitted by the Senate. To date, there have only been eight impeachment convictions, all handed down against federal judges.
Trump is often compared to Richard Nixon for his abuse of power, ruthlessness, paranoia, and relentless pursuit of revenge against real and imaginary enemies. Both men have also been accused of believing in the “madman theory” of the presidency—the idea that if the president appears to be temperamentally extreme and unhinged, he will be seen as willing to do anything, no matter how vile or illegal, to impose his will.
But the conventional thinking that Trump will eventually suffer Nixon’s fate has been proven wrong. The Republican Party of the 1970s was tethered to constitutional governance. Today’s GOP has degenerated into a neofascist political cult. Trump has given the party control of all three branches of government, and he has given party leaders permission to be the most authoritarian versions of themselves. The party did not abandon Trump even when presented with overwhelming evidence in his second impeachment trial that he had incited the January 6 insurrection. There is no reason to believe it will abandon him now.
Still, hope springs eternal. On April 6, Democratic Rep. John Larson of Connecticut introduced a resolution to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Drafted by Ralph Nader and constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, the resolution consists of 13 articles that charge Trump with, among other derelictions, violating Congress’ war powers by unconstitutionally initiating wars as a belligerent or co-belligerent against Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Nigeria, and Gaza; militarizing domestic law enforcement with deployments of the National Guard; and using Immigration and Customs Enforcement to racially profile citizens and suspected immigrants.
In a rational country with leaders committed to the rule of law, the resolution would swiftly lead to Trump’s demise. But we are not that country today.
The 25th Amendment
Ratified in 1967, the 25th Amendment was drafted in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy to clarify the law of succession when the president becomes disabled. According to the first paragraph of Section 4 of the amendment:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments [the Cabinet] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
As Trump continues to unravel, invoking Allah in threats to obliterate Iranian civilization and attacking the pope as too liberal and weak on crime, calls to invoke Section 4 have accelerated. But Section 4 is an even weaker remedy than impeachment.
The second and final paragraph of Section 4 instructs that the president can attempt to override a declaration of disability by notifying the Senate and House leadership that no such disability exists. Thereafter, the vice president, with the support of either a majority of the Cabinet or “the other body” of the first paragraph, can contest the president’s override. To resolve the conflict and place the vice president in charge, a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress—not just the Senate—is required to confirm that the president is, in fact, “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
The procedures outlined in Section 4 have never been invoked, and it strains credulity to think they will be used against Trump as long as JD Vance is the vice president and the Cabinet is staffed by sycophants and grifters who routinely pledge their loyalty to their dear leader.
This is not to say that agitating for impeachment or calling for Trump’s removal on 25th Amendment grounds is pointless. But we should not view the avenues for forcing Trump’s early exit as ends in themselves. Rather, they are best seen as organizing tools that can be useful in drawing Americans into a broad-based movement to restore democracy. In Hungary last week, 16 years of authoritarian rule ended with the defeat of Viktor Orbán. It can and must happen here.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Is Stark-Raving Mad—Impeach Him Now
He’s been losing it for a while now, but in the last few months it’s become far worse.
Apr 17, 2026
It’s a catastrophe on the way to becoming a cataclysm.
Trump is rapidly going stark-raving mad. He’s a clear and present danger to the United States and the world.
Earlier this week he lashed out at The New York Times after its chief White House correspondent questioned his mental health and stability and pointed to his “erratic behavior and extreme comments.”
“HAVE THEY NO SHAME? HAVE THEY NO SENSE OF DECENCY?” Trump posted in CAPITAL LETTERS about the Times, inadvertently echoing the famous words of Joseph Welch when standing up to Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Trump went on to take issue with the Times’s coverage of his war in Iran rather than his mental state, as if to prove the Times’s point.
He keeps saying he’s “won” the war with Iran, although he’s never said what “winning” means. At one moment his goal is to free Iran’s people. At another, it’s to end Iran’s capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. At another, to destroy Iran’s missiles. At another, to achieve “regime change.” At another, to open the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before Trump started his war). At another, he says he’ll know the U.S. military operation in Iran is over when he feels it "[in] my bones.”
We are all endangered. What happens if, in a demented rage, he hurls a nuclear bomb? Who is watching the “football” with the nuclear codes? Who’s ready to stop him to save the world?
He can’t even stay on the same subject for more than a few minutes. In the middle of a high-level Cabinet meeting about the war, he spends five minutes talking about his preference for Sharpie pens. He interrupts another Iran war update to praise the White House drapes.
He threatens that if Iran doesn’t reopen the strait, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Then he says America doesn’t need the strait reopened. Then he says: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
He calls the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” because the Pope wants peace. He posts an AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus, then says he was only depicting himself as a physician.
He won’t give up on his illegal and dangerous (for the economy) criminal investigation of Fed Chief Jerome Powell, claiming it’s not just about Powell’s renovations at the Fed but also a “probe on incompetence,” adding he’ll fire Powell if he doesn’t resign after his term as chair ends.
He claims that the United States “needs” Greenland. He confuses Greenland with Iceland. He says whales are being killed by windmills. He claims that he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. He says the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed. He goes on an eight-minute ramble about poisonous snakes in Peru. He boasts of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Armenia.
After Robert Mueller’s death, he says, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” He blames the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle on “the anger [Rob Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” After Joe Biden is diagnosed with an aggressive form of Stage 4 prostate cancer, Trump says, “I’m surprised that the public wasn’t notified a long time ago because to get to Stage 9, that’s a long time” (there is no Stage 9 cancer).
He’s been losing it for a while now, but in the last few months it’s become far worse.
In 2017, 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals concluded in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump that Trump’s mental condition posed a “clear and present danger” to the nation.
In 2021, members of Trump’s own Cabinet — horrified by the January 6, 2021, violence at the Capitol and Trump’s lack of urgency in stopping it — discussed whether to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office due to mental incompetence.
During his 2024 campaign, he attacked Kamala Harris and then went into the stratosphere of his bonkers mind:
“She destroyed the city of San Francisco, it’s – and I own a big building there – it’s no – I shouldn’t talk about this, but that’s OK, I don’t give a damn because this is what I’m doing. I should say it’s the finest city in the world – sell and get the hell out of there, right? But I can’t do that. I don’t care, you know? I lost billions of dollars, billions of dollars. You know, somebody said, ‘What do you think you lost?’ I said, ‘Probably two, three billion. That’s OK, I don’t care.’ They say, ‘You think you’d do it again?’ And that’s the least of it. Nobody. They always say, I don’t know if you know. Lincoln was horribly treated. Uh, Jefferson was pretty horribly. Andrew Jackson, they say, was the worst of all, that he was treated worse than any other president. I said, ‘Do that study again, because I think there’s nobody close to Trump.’ I even got shot! And who the hell knows where that came from, right?”
It’s no longer possible to overlook his conspiracy-obsessed paranoia, his uncontrolled rage, his emotional volatility, his delusional claims, his vengeful rantings, his foul-mouthed posturing, his increasing detachment from reality.
Yet his Cabinet members and aides keep their heads down. Republican members of Congress pretend not to notice. His billionaire supporters dare not speak of his rapid decline. The media tries to “sanewash” his growing incoherence.
But some voices on the right — people who have long been supporters of Trump — have had enough.
Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump’s threat to destroy Iran’s civilization is “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Far-right podcaster Candace Owens calls him “a genocidal lunatic.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.” A White House lawyer in Trump’s first term, Ty Cobb, says Trump is “clearly insane.” Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says “he’s clearly not well.”
The public is catching on. Fully 61 percent of Americans think he’s become more erratic with age, while just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges” (down from 54 percent in 2023).
For the good of the nation and the world, it’s time we face the reality: The most powerful man in the world does not have the mental capacity to do the job. Donald Trump — who has a family history of dementia — is increasingly unhinged.
We are all endangered. What happens if, in a demented rage, he hurls a nuclear bomb? Who is watching the “football” with the nuclear codes? Who’s ready to stop him to save the world?
Don’t wait. Impeach him now.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular