Donald Trump has joked that the cabinet may invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him if he revealed his plans for the Iran war. The President made the remark during a recent cabinet meeting on March 26. While hinting at plans on Iran, Trump joked he’d rather stay quiet.
Donald Trump jokes about 25th Amendment
In this month’s cabinet meeting, Donald Trump cracked a joke about being removed from his position. When asked about his next steps regarding the war with Iran, the President joked, “I can’t say what we’re going to do because if I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here for long. They’d probably — what is it called? The 25th Amendment? — They’d institute the 25th Amendment.”
Amid a wave of chuckles from the room, the POTUS added, “They institute the 25th Amendment, which they didn’t do with Biden, which is shocking. “The 25th Amendment was established in the 1960s in the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It allows the President to temporarily transfer his powers to the Vice President in cases of disability. Section 4 of the amendment also allows the VP to initiate the power transfer with the majority of the cabinet. Even without the President’s approval.
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Biden have utilized Section 3 of the amendment in the past to temporarily leave office to undergo colonoscopies. However, the 4th section of the amendment has never been invoked before.
Shortly after the January 6 United States Capitol attack in 2021, the House of Representatives passed a resolution requesting that the former Vice President Mike Pence. It was to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to “declare President Donald J. Trump incapable of executing the duties of his office and to immediately exercise powers as acting President.”
However, Pence wrote a letter to the then-Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, refusing to do so. “I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our Nation or consistent with our Constitution,” Pence wrote. He refused to use the amendment as “a means of punishment or usurpation.”
