Don’t Count on the 25th Amendment To Dethrone Donald Trump

In recent weeks, a growing number of Democrats and progressives have called on federal officials to invoke the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to remove President Donald Trump from office. Even some of Trump’s most stalwart onetime allies are joining in.

While it may feel good to wishcast about booting Trump from the presidency, the 25th Amendment is perhaps the most unlikely strategy possible.

Adopted after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the 25th Amendment addresses how to replace a president or vice president who dies, resigns, or becomes otherwise incapacitated.

It also establishes how to remove a president who may not want to be removed.

The amendment imbues this power in the vice president, as well as “a majority of either the principle officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide.” Since Congress never did so, this means the secretaries of most of the 15 Cabinet departments.

If the vice president and at least eight Cabinet secretaries feel “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” they would notify the speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate. The vice president would then become “acting president.” If the sitting president objects, then Congress has 21 days to decide if he is still fit to serve, or if he should be removed; removal would require a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate.

It’s a lengthy and complex process, which has never been invoked. And that’s why Democrats have no chance whatsoever of making it happen.

To be clear, it’s not as if Trump’s conduct isn’t troubling, or doesn’t deserve condemnation. Since launching a war against Iran without congressional approval, the president has used the threat of nuclear holocaust as a negotiating tactic, and he often touts positive developments in negotiations that aren’t borne out by the facts.

And that’s not even to mention his social media posts likening himself to Jesus Christ or tarring the pope as “weak on crime.”

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum has written, if Trump were senile, would we even be able to tell?

But invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump would involve enlisting, first and foremost, Vice President J.D. Vance. And since Vance likely has ambitions in 2028 and beyond, he’ll need Trump’s base on his side; he’ll likely not endear himself to them by knifing their figurehead in the back.

Even if Vance did decide Trump must go, he would need eight Cabinet secretaries to join him. And this is a president who demands his subordinates be such sycophants that televised Cabinet meetings involve secretaries, one after another, lavishing him with praise.

And having the Cabinet on board still may not be enough. “Trump could preemptively fire everyone in his cabinet who does not pledge fealty, and then use the Vacancies Reform Act to install loyalists as acting cabinet heads,” wrote South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman.

“No one disputes that invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is difficult, requiring government officials selected by, and likely close to, the president to take affirmative and public action against him,” adds Molly Nixon of the Cato Institute. “There are good reasons for that difficulty. Invoking Section 4 is unavoidably antidemocratic and, even if reluctantly employed, can risk the appearance of something similar to a coup.”

Last week, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.) introduced legislation to create the dedicated “body” that Section 4 of the 25th Amendment called for, which would take the place of the Cabinet members. Raskin’s bill would create a commission with 16 appointed members, plus a commission chair that the members would then pick. Leaders of both major parties in the House and Senate would pick the members—four physicians, four psychiatrists, and the rest former executive branch officials, like former presidents, vice presidents, or attorneys general.

This commission would then “conduct an examination of the President to determine whether the President is incapacitated, either mentally or physically,” and then submit a report to the House and Senate within 72 hours “providing whether the President is able to discharge the powers and duties of the office and otherwise describing the findings and conclusions of the examination.”

This provision is clearly borne out by concerns that Trump’s behavior is a sign of age and mental deterioration, and not just the way he’s always been. It’s also the most unworkable part of Raskin’s bill.

“Diagnosing a political leader with a mental health condition, and then using that diagnosis as the basis for removing him from office, is extremely problematic,” Andy Craig writes at MS NOW. “This is a political decision of the highest order, a matter for our nation’s constitutional officers. It is not a diagnostic exercise for deciding how best to treat a patient.”

Besides, Raskin’s bill would have to not only survive a House and Senate both controlled by Republicans, but it would have to have such bipartisan buy-in that it could survive Trump’s inevitable veto.

That, ultimately, is the biggest reason Democrats have no chance of invoking the 25th Amendment: Even if all the principal players agree Trump must be removed, it would then require two-thirds of both the House and Senate to carry it out.

And if Democrats had the votes to do that, they wouldn’t need to involve the Cabinet; they could simply impeach and remove Trump from office.

But Democrats famously tried and failed to do that twice, including in 2021, when the makeup of the Senate was tied; even with seven Republican defectors, they were 10 votes shy of the two-thirds required to convict and bar Trump from office. The Senate is now in solidly Republican hands, meaning Democrats would need 20 Republicans to agree that their own party’s president must go.

And so far, Democrats have been unable to even muster 60 votes in the Senate to rein in Trump’s unconstitutional war with Iran. Do they really expect to get to 67?

Plus, it’s not as if Democrats have covered themselves in glory on this issue. Before then-President Joe Biden announced his reelection campaign, The New York Times reported in 2022 that among “nearly 50 Democratic officials, from county leaders to members of Congress,” there was “deep concern about his political viability.”

Yet consider how many Democrats publicly insisted Biden was not only fit to serve but to continue serving another four years, past his 86th birthday. That argument came to a crashing halt in June 2024, when Biden performed so poorly in a debate against Trump that it raised questions about his cognitive fitness.

Even then, some Democrats still defended Biden, improbably insisting it was simply a bad night. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D–Texas) wrote on X at the time that Biden “has been traveling & obviously battling being under the weather & frankly a little over prepared.”

“The only thing that I’m asking everyone to do is to unite around the ticket,” Crockett said the following week. “And so long as the president says that he can do this job, then that is our ticket.”

Crockett is now a cosponsor of Raskin’s bill.