The 24-7-365 “breaking news” cycle in America has led to enormous amounts of coverage on the ongoing United States military actions in Iran. The latest news has focused not only on these military actions but also on increasingly aggressive efforts to remove Donald Trump from office and end his role as Commander-in-Chief of the United States military.
Critics of Trump suggest his military strategy in Iran was not approved in advance by Congress, is deeply flawed, could lead to a protracted war comparable to the unsuccessful twenty-year U.S. military efforts in Vietnam, and any war in Iran could escalate into World War III.Other Trump critics suggest Trump is not fit to serve based on their thinking that he is afflicted with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). They suggest Trump clearly displays one key symptom of FTD: loss of social communication skills resulting in inappropriate responses or lack of engagement.
As evidence of that FTD symptom, Trump critics refer to him recently saying that if Iran did not agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Roughly 10 hours later, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire agreement to pursue negotiations on that issue.
That is Trump being Trump. It is consistent with a negotiating strategy in his book, The Art of the Deal: Start with ambitious or extreme demands to set the tone for negotiations.
In any event, efforts are well underway to remove President Trump from office between now the end of this term in January 2027.
Those efforts include two strategies.
One is impeachment as provided for in the U.S. Constitution. It says the President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States can be impeached for Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors with a simple majority vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. They can be removed from office if convicted of those charges by a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate. The Constitution does not include a definition of High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Former President and longtime member of Congress Gerald Ford once observed, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
The House of Representatives has voted to approve presidential articles of impeachment four times. Removal from office via House impeachment charges and a Senate verdict of guilty on those charges has never yet occurred.
The first time the House of Representatives approved articles of Impeachment was against Andrew Johnson shortly after the civil war. In more recent times, the House has approved articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton and Donald Trump twice (in 2020 and in 2021 when Trump had less than one week until the end of his first term). Those filed against Johnson, Clinton, and Trump failed to generate a guilty verdict in the Senate. Richard Nixon was never formally impeached as he resigned after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment but before the full House voted on them.
The other strategy for removal from office is provided for in the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment addresses what occurs if a president and/or vice president dies, resigns, becomes incapacitated, or becomes disabled. It also allows the vice president and a majority of a presidential cabinet to declare a president unfit for office. The vice president would then serve as acting president until the president proves he or she is capable of resuming his or her duties, or two-thirds of Congress votes to keep him or her out of office. In that case, the vice president would continue to serve as president.
Removal from office under the 25th Amendment has never occurred. It has been used very rarely and only on a temporary short-term basis when a president voluntarily invoked it prior to minor medical procedures requiring anesthesia. In each case immediately following the medical procedure, the president revoked the temporary transfer of power.
When all is said and done about removing Trump from office, either by impeachment or the 25th Amendment, a lot will be said, but nothing will happen except enormous amounts of political posturing and grandstanding by members of both parties. A successful impeachment effort will fail even if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.
If that happens, Senate convictions are contingent on Democrats getting at least a two-thirds Senate majority in those midterm elections and getting that majority to vote guilty on new Trump impeachment charges. Currently that is inconceivable. The last time Democratic Senators had a two-thirds majority in the Senate was from 1965 through 1967. Even more inconceivable is the vice president and a majority of the cabinet voting to declare Trump unfit for office.
Now is the time for many of Trump’s opponents to acknowledge that pursuing his removal from office based on concerns about his mental health takes hypocrisy and hyper-partisanship to a new level in the political arena. For four years, many of them insisted former President Biden was not experiencing declines in his mental acuity.
Those declines were largely affirmed by a successful coup to remove Biden from running for reelection and to install former Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement.
More importantly, pursuing Trump’s removal based on an unverified diagnosis of debilitating mental health issues will exacerbate the already deep divisions in American society when we need a bipartisan focus in Washington to address issues impacting our future: immigration reform, the economy, cost of living, health care, affordable housing, good schools, and crime.