I have a Google News search for Trump 25th Amendment. Since President Biden was inaugurated articles with this term rarely turned up in the emails that sent me links. I was surprised today to find three articles.
The each story is very different. For example this is in Newsweek:
In his book Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes, TV producer Ira Rosen revealed that Bannon "believed Trump was suffering from early stage dementia and that there was a real possibility he would be removed from office by the 25th Amendment, where the Cabinet could vote that the president was no longer mentally capable of carrying out his duties."
The possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment was widely discussed on numerous occasions throughout Trump's erratic presidency.
This is in UPROXX, a website that mostly covers music, film, and other entertainment, but in their culture section sometimes has political articles like “Author/Historian Thomas Frank On Why The Democratic Party Needs To Reclaim Populism From Republicans” and the following:
Kinzinger was the first Republican lawmaker to agree with Democrats that they should invoke the 25th amendment after the aborted but deadly January 6 insurrection. It even cost him the love of some family members. But he’s soldiered on, and on Sunday he went on Face the Nation to warn that the party he’s long called his own that, should they continue to be in thrall to a former commander-in-chief who now lives in a resort with strangers, then they’re in deep, deep doo-doo.Kinzinger was the first Republican lawmaker to agree with Democrats that they should invoke the 25th amendment after the aborted but deadly January 6 insurrection. It even cost him the love of some family members. But he’s soldiered on, and on Sunday he went on Face the Nation to warn that the party he’s long called his own that, should they continue to be in thrall to a former commander-in-chief who now lives in a resort with strangers, then they’re in deep, deep doo-doo.
and this from the Russian state run website Sputnik:
Note the smug self-satisfied photo they used to illustrate the story. I wonder what kind of editorial message Russia is trying to send by choosing this photo (click to enlarge):
In January, in the aftermath of the Capitol riots, Maloney (House Oversight Committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney) called on the president to be removed from office, either by impeachment or by invoking the 25th amendment, a constitutional amendment dealing with succession in the event that a president dies or is incapacitated from being able to perform his or her duties.
The Way-Way-Way-Back Nostaligia Machine prompts me to note that in March of 2017 it was clinical psychologist John Gartner, founder of Duty to Warn, who started the 25th Amendment petition. I was one of the first mental health professionals to join this group
We, the undersigned mental health professionals (please state your degree), believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States. And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
At t the time the petition was written about in various publications including Psychology Today:
Two days after the Jan. 6th insurrection Gartner and two psychiatrists published this in the N.Y. Daily News:
This article reveals something I didn’t know about:
While the Capitol was under attack from a mob incited by the president, one of us received a personal text from a congresswoman. Why would a congresswoman personally text, especially in a moment of national crisis, when she was personally under fire? What was so important to say at that moment?
“You were right,” she wrote.
Two years ago, the three of us, a psychologist and two psychiatrists, dedicated a week to roaming the halls of Capitol Hill, the same halls we saw overrun by the unruly mob yesterday, speaking to as many congresspeople and staffers as possible, to warn them that Trump was disturbed, dangerous, destructive, capable of anything and sure to get much, much worse. As impractical as it seemed, we urged his removal under the 25th Amendment, or impeachment.
I wonder who the congresswoman was.
Hindsight doesn’t do you much good unless you’re backing up your car. In retrospect we can only imagine what would have happened if Trump had been removed under the 25th Amendment and Pence became acting president.
