Responding to President Donald Trump’s recent megaphone diplomacy, Democratic critics seized on the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, under which the Cabinet or Congress may remove a chief executive if he’s incapable of discharging the duties of his office.
None of those brandishing this constitutional club at him genuinely thought Trump could be removed — Vice President JD Vance would have to agree — but they wanted something extreme to say while they stood in the warm glow of TV lights, and the 25th Amendment came readily to hand.
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They cannot stand that they lost the last election or abide the man who beat them fair and square. They have always treated him as an illegitimate president, and it salves their wounded pride to pretend they can get rid of him by depicting him as mad and incompetent.
The proximate cause of their feeble demands was his social media comment on Iran that, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
Bingo! Up popped Democrats such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), to say: “Every member of Congress and senator must be calling for Trump’s removal today.”
But did Khanna or anyone else go to bed that night genuinely worried that Trump’s threat was real and that he’d carry it out? Did the egregious Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) or any of the other frothing pols? Of course they didn’t. They knew he was blasting excessive and intemperate rhetoric at Tehran — most of us wish he wouldn’t — because that’s how he thinks he might frighten his enemies into capitulation.
Even after more than a decade during which Trump’s words and modus operandi have been more exposed than anything else on the planet, his critics fail to learn, or will not acknowledge, the truth of the axiom that he should be taken seriously, not literally.
I once debated a well-known, more-or-less conservative public figure about this, and he insisted: “I take Trump both literally and seriously, which is why he horrifies me.” But the point of the axiom is that if you take Trump literally, you are not taking him seriously. Because he often says outlandish, even ridiculous things — the two are mutually exclusive. Those who pretended to believe Trump would destroy an entire civilization think they are serious people, but prove daily that they aren’t. Some of the same people who blasted him for his bellicose threats were up bright and early the next day to mock him for chickening out. They take whatever is available and bash him with it. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.
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One cannot help feeling that those who cite the 25th Amendment do so not because they believe Trump is incompetent but because they know that, despite all his faults and failings, he gets many good things done and he wholly overmatches them politically.
They want him gone because his methods often work, not because they don’t. He stands between them and the fulfilment of their desire to make America apologetic, deferential to international bodies, and weaker across the entire policy spectrum. He is a bulwark against their ambitions, so they rant and they rave. He does, too, of course. But he is in power because voters put him there, and his opponents are not.
