The Trump administration is facing another round of urgent demands to remove the president from office after he declared that a “whole civilization will die” in his latest open threats against Iran.
Former MAGA allies Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene are now embracing calls to invoke the 25th Amendment, which allows for the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare the president unfit for office. Congress can also determine by a two-thirds vote whether to permanently remove him.
“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Jones asked on his InfoWars broadcast Monday.
“The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people!” Jones wrote on X, following Trump’s threats to eliminate Iranian civilization Tuesday. “Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!”
Greene urged: “25th AMENDMENT!!!”
“Not a single bomb has dropped on America,” the former Republican congresswoman wrote. “We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
In an ultimatum to Tehran, Trump has demanded a ceasefire agreement or the U.S. will escalate its war by destroying all power plants and bridges in a country of more than 90 million people. After he spent weeks waffling on how he perceives the war is progressing, Trump said his 8 p.m. ET Tuesday deadline was final.
“The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night,” Trump said Monday.
On Tuesday morning, he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
Iran’s closure of the critical Strait of Hormuz has choked off global oil supplies and surged barrel prices. More than dozen U.S. service members have been killed, more than 300 have been injured, and several jets have been critically damaged or destroyed. More than 1,500 civilians have been killed, according to Iranian human rights groups.
In an Easter message Sunday, Trump told Iran to “Open the F****’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.”
Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari, who previously demanded Trump’s removal over his ongoing threats to Greenland, again called for the 25th Amendment and introduced articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“Trump is escalating a devastating, illegal war, threatening massive war crimes and targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran,” she said Monday.
Ansari argued that the president’s rhetoric only emboldens the regime against the U.S. while putting millions of people and American service members at risk.
On Jones’s broadcast, his guest and former attorney Robert Barnes said the administration officials would need to “tackle Trump and let him pretend he’s president and publicly report that he’s going through a health issue.”
“It literally needs to be something like that. It’s that bad,” Barnes added.
“This isn’t a guy acting like he’s crazy,” Jones said. “This is real.”
“He’s threatening an extinction-level event for the people of Iran,” Barnes replied. “Does nobody think there’s gonna be any blowback from that? If he follows through on that, the whole world is screwed.”
Jones, who supported Trump in his first term and throughout his re-election campaigns, said last week that it’s time to “cut bait on Trump” because the president “is in free fall.”
In January 2021, Congressional Democrats publicly urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment after Trump failed to stop hundreds of his supporters from breaking into the Capitol in a violent attempt to block the certification of the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
House lawmakers voted 223-205 on January 12, 2021, to adopt a resolution that would compel Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment. Pence rejected the effort, and Trump was later impeached by the House for inciting an insurrection.
The amendment explicitly makes clear that the vice president becomes president “in case of the removal of the president from office or of his death or resignation.”
But removing the president would require the vice president and a majority of the 16-member presidential cabinet to jointly agree that “the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
This appears extremely unlikely in an administration that Trump has purposefully built on ironclad allegiance to him.
Another option could require the creation of a disability review panel, which would need approval by Congress and the president's signature, or, if vetoed, the support of at least two-thirds of the House and Senate.
Once the vice president and either the cabinet or a disability review panel agree that the president must be removed, the vice president would then immediately be able to “assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.”
The president could then tell Congress that “no inability exists” and will “resume the powers and duties of his office,” which the cabinet or disability panel can then challenge.
Congress then has 21 days to settle whether the president is fit to serve. A two-thirds vote from both the House and Senate must agree to let the vice president step in.
The “intended constitutional remedy for this behavior is impeachment and removal,” according to Jamal Greene, a constitutional law professor at Columbia Law School. “The fact that that remedy is politically impossible is a scandal and a crisis,” he wrote.
“Threatening to end an entire civilization of 90 million people in order to bend a nation’s conduct to your will is grossly morally wrong,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said Monday. “It is evil. And we should say this loudly.”
Trump may see his rhetoric as “bluster” in an effort to make a “deal” with Iran, but “this is just not how the human race should operate … under threat of murder of innocent people,” he added.
The Independent has requested comment from the White House.
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