President Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly said he would support invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office if he was still part of the Cabinet.
Kelly, who also served under Trump as director of Homeland Security, said that while he doesn’t think the president’s Cabinet members will meet to discuss taking the unprecedented action, he said they should discuss the matter.
“The Cabinet should meet and have a discussion. I don’t think it will happen. But I think the Cabinet should meet and discuss this because the behavior yesterday and in the weeks and months before that has been outrageous from the president,” the retired Marine Corps general told CNN host Jake Tapper. “And what happened on Capitol Hill yesterday is a direct result of his poisoning the minds of people with the lies and the frauds.”
Tapper asked Kelly, who served in the Trump administration from the president’s inauguration until January 2019, if he would vote to invoke the 25th Amendment if he were still working in the White House.
“Yes, I would,” Kelly responded. “The one thing we have going for us here, Jake, is it’s only 13 more days. And no one, as indicated yesterday by our vice president, no one around him anymore is going to break the law. He can give all the orders he wants, and no one is going to break the law. We saw Mike Pence, Vice President Pence, stand his ground yesterday.”
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, allows a majority vote from members of the Cabinet, or another congressionally designated body, to allow the vice president to assume the powers of the presidency if the president is considered unfit for service.
In the hours following the chaos on Capitol Hill, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee urged Pence to invoke the amendment and remove Trump from office. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, also said he supports Trump’s removal.
Kinzinger said the president has become “unmoored, not just from his duty or even his oath but from reality itself” and that “yesterday, it became evident that not only has the president abdicated his duty to protect the American people and the people’s house.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday that she believes lawmakers can impeach and remove Trump during his waning days in office if Pence does not assume the mantle via the 25th Amendment.
“It’s a simple matter. In terms of the Constitution, the vice president, working with the Cabinet, more than 50% of the Cabinet, can immediately improve the security of our country,” she told reporters. “By inciting sedition as he did yesterday, he must be removed from office.”
Little has been heard from the president since Wednesday’s rioting on Capitol Hill. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram have all locked the president out of his accounts. Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert Contee said at a Thursday press conference that one person was fatally shot during the incursion, and three others died in the ensuing chaos.
