User:1Veertje/trump

During Donald Trump's presidency discussions have frequently resurfaced as to the applicability of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to his behavior. Public interest first arose after the conclusion of the 2016 election in November 2016. Around this time, never-Trumper David Frum predicted in a tweet that there would be more reporting about the Amendment in the future. Keith Olbermann, in his vlog for GQ magazine, laid out his reasons for thinking Trump would already qualify, and compared dismissal through its process to how Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill lost their prime ministership in the United Kingdom.

In January 2017, around the time of the inauguration, Richard Cohen for the The Washington Post, Jeffrey Frank for The New Yorker, Heather Digby Parton for Salon, Gabriel Schoenfeld for USA Today and Rosa Brooks for Foreign Policy magazine highlighted the Amendment as a possible way Donald Trump's presidency could effectively end.

On February 15, 2017 Earl Blumenauer took to the floor of the House of Representatives to urge a review of the Amendment in light of the turbulent early weeks of the Trump presidency.

Representatives Blumenauer and Jamie Raskin introduced the Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity Act on April 14, 2017. The bill would replace the Cabinet as the body that, together with the Vice President, determines whether Section 4 should be invoked. Under the bill, an eleven-member commission would conduct an examination of the President when directed to do so by a concurrent resolution of the Congress.

According to Blumenauer:""It is hard to imagine a better group to work with the vice president to examine whether the president is able to discharge the duties of the office. When there are questions about the president’s ability to fulfill his or her constitutional responsibilities, it is in the country’s best interest to have a mechanism in place that works effectively.""

Ross Douthat wrote two columns for The New York Times in May 2017 advocating for it after Trump had dismissed James Comey and disclosed classified information to Russian government representatives. Responses were mixed: Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg, Ian Tuttle in National Review, and John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist concluded that there would likely be a political crisis if elites invoked a contested interpretation of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, judged it highly unlikely that cabinet officials would initiate its procedures. Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post characterized Douthat's interpretation of the Amendment not only as wrong, but dangerous.

#25thAmendment became trending on Twitter July 2nd after Trump tweeted a gif of himself physically attacking a personification of CNN and disparaging remarks about Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski. The hashtag got further amplified the following day when Jon Cooper, chair of the Democratic Coalition, tweeted that he had a White House source that had told him it was making Trump furious.

The Amendment reentered the newscycle after Donald Trump escalated the conflict with North Korea on August 8th by warning that their nuclear threats would "be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which the world has never seen before," and made comments on August 12th, following a far-right rally in Charlottesville, that were seen as implying a moral equivalence between white supremacist marchers and those who protested them. These events led Jackie Speier, Congressperson for California, to publically demand the Amendment's invocation on August 16th. Congressperson Zoe Lofgren introduced a resolution on August 18th urging Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to consider the 25th Amendment, citing concerns about Donald Trump's mental health.

On October 11th, Vanity Fair reported that Steve Bannon had warned Donald Trump that the Twenty-fifth Amendment could pose a bigger risk to his presidency than impeachment. Trump reportedly didn't know about the Amendment.

In January 2018, it was reported by Michael Wolff in his book Fire and Fury that the Twenty-fifth Amendment had been a frequent topic of discussion among the staff of the White House.

On September 5th 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed titled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration in which an anonymous source from within the White House states that there had been cabinet-level discussions about invoking the Amendment.