\tPresident Donald Trump mimics firing a gun during a news conference in the White House briefing room about the war in Iran on April 6, 2026. | \ufeffTom Williams\/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images\t<\/p>\n
The 25th Amendment is having a moment.<\/p>\n
According to a tally by NBC News, over 70 Democratic lawmakers called for President Donald Trump\u2019s Cabinet to invoke an obscure constitutional provision that would allow them to temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president, after Trump threatened to wipe out \u201ca whole civilization\u201d in Iran. (Trump has backed away from that threat, at least for now.)<\/p>\n
Notably, their call for a 25th Amendment solution was echoed by some voices on the far right, including former US Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, radio host Alex Jones, and MAGA influencer Candace Owens.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the first time the amendment has come up. There\u2019s been a regular background hum of Trump critics demanding its invocation throughout both his terms in office, which peaked in the days after January 6, 2021, with real conversations in his Cabinet and in congressional leadership about the process.<\/p>\n
As a practical matter, Trump is not going anywhere, even if he didn\u2019t command the near-universal loyalty within his party that he currently does. By international standards, it is extremely difficult to remove the president of the United States, and much harder than it is to remove the leaders of many of our peer democracies. And the 25th Amendment is not a viable shortcut around this problem, which is rooted in the fundamental structure of America\u2019s government.<\/p>\n
How the 25th Amendment actually works<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s cut to the chase: Trump is about as likely to be removed via the 25th Amendment as he is to be deposed by an army of unicorn-riding elves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While it is theoretically possible to remove Trump from office (or, at least, to strip him of his powers permanently) using the amendment, the removal process is too cumbersome, has too many failure points, and requires too much of a bipartisan consensus to be an effective method of removing a president who is merely bad at being president, rather than one who is literally incapable of performing their duties.<\/p>\n
The 25th Amendment was enacted shortly after President John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination in 1963, and was intended to solve a different problem than the one the United States faces today \u2014 what if the president of the United States was still alive, but was physically or mentally incapacitated in a way that prevented him from exercising the powers of office?<\/p>\n
Before the 25th Amendment was ratified, the Constitution provided that the vice president shall assume the powers of the presidency should the president show \u201cInability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office.\u201d But the original Constitution did not lay out a process to determine when the president was unable to exercise their duties. That created a risk that the president may be unfit for duty, but no one could be sure how to formally transfer power to the vice president.<\/p>\n
The process laid out in the 25th Amendment is, to put it mildly, complicated. It allows the vice president to declare the president unfit for duty, provided that a majority of the president\u2019s Cabinet officers consent. Once the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet inform Congress that \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
But such a declaration is unlikely to amount to much if the president is still capable of clinging to power. The 25th Amendment also provides that the president may regain their authority merely by transmitting his own \u201cwritten declaration that no inability exists\u201d to congressional leaders. If that happens, the vice president and the Cabinet may force a congressional vote on whether the president should retain power, but if two-thirds of both houses of Congress do not agree that \u201cthe President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,\u201d then the president remains president. And they can\u2019t stall the vote for too long: if Congress does nothing in 21 days, the president regains his executive powers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To even begin the process of removing Trump, in other words, a majority of Trump\u2019s hand-picked Cabinet officials (plus Vice President JD Vance) would need to agree that he was unfit. Then, when Trump inevitably told Congress that he was resuming his duties, a supermajority of both the US House and the Senate \u2014 both of which are controlled by Trump\u2019s Republican Party \u2014 would have to vote to install Vance as acting president.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There really was some limited bipartisan chatter in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol about removing Trump via the 25th Amendment. But Trump was a lame duck with only two weeks left in office then, meaning a Cabinet vote to strip him of his powers, combined with the 21-day time limit in Congress, could actually run out the clock on his presidency.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That wouldn\u2019t be a possibility this time. Indeed, because the 25th Amendment requires a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress to remove Trump against his will, it is even more cumbersome than the impeachment process, which only requires a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In 2021, the Senate couldn\u2019t even secure a two-thirds majority to disqualify Trump from office while he was on trial for stirring up a violent attack against the Senate itself.<\/p>\n
Other democracies make it much easier to remove an incompetent, unfit, or unpopular leader<\/p>\n
The United States is unusual in that it elects its chief executive separately from its legislature. The US often elects a Congress that is controlled by a different party than the one that controls the White House. And the Congress has only limited power to remove a president \u2014 a power it has never successfully used in all of US history.<\/p>\n
Compare this system to parliamentary democracies such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and Japan. In these systems, the people elect the members of the legislature, but the legislature chooses the official who will run the government. That official also can often be removed by a no-confidence vote in the legislature, frequently by a simple majority.<\/p>\n
The founders saw this as a key feature: The executive branch and legislative branch were expected to each jockey for control in order to keep either from consolidating power. But as the late political scientist Juan Linz observed in 1990, presidential democracies such as the United States have proven inherently unstable, because the president and the legislature may deadlock on some crucial issue and both can simultaneously claim to have a popular mandate if such a deadlock occurs. The US system also locks in place a president who may have lost the confidence of both the Congress and the people, but who is nonetheless entitled to serve out their entire term.<\/p>\n
One additional advantage of parliamentary democracy is that it allows a political party to remove an unfit or unpopular leader without triggering a political crisis. In 1990, for example, British Conservatives replaced unpopular Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with John Major, and then retained power for seven more years under new leadership. A similar drama recently played out in Canada, where the governing Liberal Party replaced former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with current PM Mark Carney \u2014 allowing Carney to lead the Liberals to another electoral victory in 2025.<\/p>\n
In parliamentary systems, in other words, removal of a head of government isn\u2019t an unheard-of event that humiliates the outgoing leader and places them in a class of one. It is a normal political tactic that allows the outgoing prime minister to leave office gracefully. That sort of system gives political parties an incentive to remove bad leaders.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the United States is almost certainly stuck with Trump until his term expires in 2029 \u2014 even if Democrats win back both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, there is no plausible outcome where they win two-thirds of the seats in the Senate. Some new controversy would have to generate near-universal bipartisan demand for his removal, and it\u2019s frankly not very pleasant to imagine what the world looks like in that scenario.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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