In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has threatened to destroy “an entire civilization,” touted U.S. military might while flanked by the Easter Bunny, picked a fight with the pope, and posted a social-media graphic depicting himself as Jesus of Nazareth. The man doesn’t seem entirely well, to put it mildly.
So it’s little wonder the 25th Amendment is having another moment: So far, more than 70 congressional Democrats have called for Trump’s constitutional removal on grounds of mental unfitness.
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But it’s almost certainly not going to happen. Recent history shows that the 25th Amendment’s “eject button” is almost impossible to trigger.
DONALD TRUMP IS LOSING HIS MIND
Drafted in the wake of the John F. Kennedy assassination and ratified in 1967, the 25th Amendment provides two ways the vice president can take over for a dysfunctional president. Under Section 3, the president steps out voluntarily; under Section 4, the vice president can take them away when he or she and a majority of the Cabinet determine that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” But there’s a reason Section 4 has, to date, only been invoked in TV-thriller plots: In real life, it’s unworkable.
“Unless the Vice President already knows that a majority of the Principal Officers supports invoking the Amendment—and who those officers are,” a 2018 Yale Law School white paper explains, broaching the subject risks “triggering a cascade of firings.” Guess wrong, and a single dissenter can short-circuit the process by running to the president. Canvassing votes would be a delicate and dangerous operation in any administration. In this one, given the “Dear Leader” aura of Trump Cabinet meetings, it looks like a suicide mission. Even if Vice President JD Vance had the inclination — and the testicular fortitude — to make this move, the odds are it would blow up before it ever got off the ground.
But imagine Vance manages to pull it off — what then? Section 4 provides that unless “by two-thirds vote of both Houses” Congress ratifies the switch, “the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”
Given the party breakdown of the 119th Congress, that means 20 GOP senators and more than 70 House Republicans would have to publicly affirm that their party’s standard-bearer is too crazy to be president. Without those votes, all Vance and company could do is put the president in a temporary time-out, after which Trump returns to the Oval Office hell-bent for vengeance. In politics as in gang warfare, “come at the king, you best not miss.”
“We were concerned about the politics of the palace coup,” one of the amendment’s framers, former Democratic Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh explained years later. So they set the bar even higher than required to remove a president via the impeachment process (something that’s also never happened).
Recent history suggests they overcorrected. One of the drafters’ central goals was preventing a replay of the Woodrow Wilson debacle, in which first lady Edith Wilson and a handful of advisers ran the executive branch while the 28th president lay bedridden by a stroke.
Our last administration featured something close to the paradigmatic Wilson case. In Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s 2025 exposé, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, top Biden aides describe the 46th president as “‘disoriented’ and ‘out of it,’ his mouth agape” — someone who couldn’t “form a f***ing sentence” or make it through tightly scripted Cabinet meetings without a teleprompter. Even so, triggering Section 4 was never seriously considered.
Granted, Trump presents a different set of risks than a semiconscious figurehead behind the Resolute Desk. Here, the worry isn’t that he’s literally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It’s that he’ll do something dangerous and abhorrent with the powers he has.
FETTERMAN SAYS ‘TACO’ CHANTS ON IRAN CEASEFIRE RUN COUNTER TO 25TH AMENDMENT CALLS
In theory, one can imagine circumstances dire enough to force this faulty constitutional failsafe to work. Suppose, in the next round of fighting, a frustrated Trump decides to act on his threat to destroy “an entire civilization.” At that point, the secretary of war could table the order, call the vice president, and set Section 4 in motion. With the president sidelined, Congress would vote knowing that failure to ratify means nuclear war.
That sort of thriller-plot scenario remains unlikely — or so we should hope. Because in that moment, the fate of the Republic and countless lives would depend on … War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Gene Healy is the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
