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The 25th Amendment: The quickest way Trump could be stripped of power, explained
Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet could declare Trump "unable" to serve. But there are some complications.
Politics
Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet could declare Trump “unable” to serve. But there are some complications.
Chaos at the US Capitol on Wednesday as a group of Trump supporters stormed the building and halted Congress’s count of the electoral votes has raised the prospect that President Donald Trump’s final two weeks in office could get much, much uglier.
Should Trump further escalate his attempts to hold on to the White House, there is a way for top officials to quickly strip him of the powers of the presidency: by invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
Under that amendment, if the vice president and a majority of Cabinet secretaries conclude the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” they can put that in writing and send it to congressional leaders. Once that happens, the vice president immediately becomes acting president. If the president disputes it, Congress decides the matter, with a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate needed to keep the vice president in charge.
Section 4 has never been invoked. Before Trump, discussions of it mostly envisioned a president who became physically or mentally unwell (in the decades before it was ratified in 1967, several presidents had faced serious health problems). But due to Trump’s erratic governance, it’s come up often during his presidency — for instance, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed invoking it after Trump fired FBI director James Comey in 2017.