The news media have repeatedly turned to the 25th Amendment as a possible way to oust President Trump from office, despite assessments from legal experts that the provision is meant to create a guideline for incapacitated presidents, not presidents who simply face disagreement or criticism from their political opponents.
Democrats raised the possibility early in Trump’s administration, and one even said it could be used to remove “incompetent” presidents. The language allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
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While experts say it’s not at all clear the provision could be used to solve political disputes about who sits in the White House, reporters have turned to the idea time and time again.
Here are eight times the news media have worked up talk about removing Trump by way of the 25th Amendment:
1. The New York Times’ Rosenstein-‘wire’ story, Sep. 21: The paper reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein suggested to colleagues that they undertake a kind of coup, even though Rosenstein denied it. “The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration,” the paper said, “and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit.” Rosenstein replied to the story by saying, “Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.”
2. Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman, who wrote a tell-all on her time in the administration, Sep. 9: “You know, we had a little hashtag, hashtag #TFA,” she said on MSNBC. “Which, you know, now that I think about it, I’m a little embarrassed to tell you how often when I went through my text chain from the White House I saw the hashtag #TFA, 25th Amendment.”
3. CBS “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan’s interview with Vice President Mike Pence, Sep. 9: “One of the claims made in the op-ed is that there have been discussions of invoking the 25th Amendment to even remove the president from office,” Brennan said. “Have you ever been part of a conversation about that?” Pence replied, “No, never, and why would we be, Margaret?”
4. Author Michael Wolff, teasing his new book, said in a Sept. 9 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he repeatedly heard White House officials bring up the 25th Amendment “all the time”: “This is, I think, not an exaggeration, and not unreasonable to say, this is 25th Amendment kind of stuff,” said Wolff.
5. The anonymous New York Times op-ed by a “senior official in the Trump administration,” Sep. 5: The op-ed read in part, “Given the instability many witnessed [in Trump], there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.”
6. Max Boot, Washington Post columnist and former Republican, Sep. 4: Reacting to journalist Bob Woodward’s latest book painting the White House in a state of constant chaos, Boot wrote, “If you take seriously the revelations in Bob Woodward’s book ‘Fear’ — and how can you not, given Woodward’s nearly half-century of scoops about Washington’s elite? — then it’s time for President Trump to be removed from office via the 25th Amendment because he is clearly ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.'”
7. Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post blogger and former Republican, responded to reports that Trump was newly in denial that it was his voice heard on the controversial “Access Hollywood” tape, Nov. 19, 2017: “If, however, [Trump] actually believes that former president Barack Obama wasn’t born in America, that Obama wiretapped him, that he (not Hillary Clinton) won the popular vote and the women’s vote and that it’s not his voice on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape,” Rubin wrote, “then he’s something far more problematic than a liar. In such circumstances, he would be mentally and emotionally incapable of performing his duties (which require one to grasp and process reality) and it would be long past time for him to go.”
8. Anti-Trump conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was among the earliest in the mainstream press to assert that Trump could be removed with the process, Sep. 16, 2017: “This will not get better,” Ross said of the administration. “It could easily get worse. And as hard and controversial as a 25th Amendment remedy would be, there are ways in which Trump’s removal today should be less painful for conservatives than abandoning him in the campaign would have been — since Hillary Clinton will not be retroactively elected if Trump is removed, nor will Neil Gorsuch be unseated. Any cost to Republicans will be counted in internal divisions and future primary challenges, not in immediate policy defeats.”
