Capitol Putsch: Donald Trump Needs The 25th Amendment Now
Donald Trump on a rally. Photo by Joseph Sohm from Shutterstock.com
- The 25th amendment allows for the removal of a President when he can no longer perform his duties.
- Today, several lawmakers called upon outgoing Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the amendment and remove Donald Trump from office.
- Pence is rumored to be considering it — but he should have done it a long time ago.
Will the 25th Amendment finally be invoked, and Donald Trump finally removed from office?
Somehow, that question still hangs in the air more than 24 hours after the “Capitol Putsch,” yesterday’s embarrassing display of white fragility in which Donald Trump — failed businessman, failed game show host, failed Hollywood star, and known Jeffrey Epstein associate — encouraged his base to storm the Capitol to disrupt the previously-mundane process of certifying the Electoral College results that would officially make President-elect Joe Biden the 46th president.
Despite the thousands of warnings on Twitter, the bragging of insurrection from the likes of Scott “The Persistence” Presler, and the goading from Rudy Giuliani to have a “trial by combat,” DC still seems to be hemming and hawing about the possibility of having to invoke the 25th Amendment.
My question is simple: what are they waiting for?
25th Amendment Now: Better Late Than Never
From the minute Donald Trump took office, Democrats have been calling for officials to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
There were no shortage of voices who claimed, of course, that this demand was “hysterical” and “politically motivated,” not the least of which included Ben Shapiro, who made a career out of defending Trump when he wasn’t getting laughably owned for bragging about not being able to please his wife in the bedroom.
And they continued to be strong and wrong up until yesterday’s Capitol Putsch — inspired, no doubt, by Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch that had the same intent, and the same end result, nearly 100 years ago — when they realized that, yeah, as a matter of fact, words do matter, and maybe the President should have chilled out with the MAGA/Deep State/George Soros rhetoric before a bunch of emboldened white supremacists stormed the Capitol to the horror of the rest of the world.
Suddenly, even Republicans are joining in the calls for the 25th Amendment to be invoked. Maybe this little Fuhrer cosplay, seen below, was finally the bridge too far?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X0KIYInLHc
Too Little, Too Late
But Republicans calling for the 25th Amendment on Donald Trump fall into the “too little, too late” category. The GOP should have denounced Trump, and all his Kardashian-style reality show pomp & circumstance when Edgar Maddison Welch shot up a pizza parlor in DC in the name of chasing after a debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory propagated by the odious QAnon.
But they didn’t. They hitched their wagons to him and continued to feed the monster, then got shocked when the monster grew big to handle.
His supporters’ equally odious claims of the mythical “Antifa” being behind this seditious plot also falls flat when you consider that not only did Biden supporters have no reason to participate in this (why would they, when they want Trump out?), but they bragged about descending on DC to storm the Capitol in their Twitter profiles, as seen in Scott Presler’s profile below.
And while we will, eventually, come back to who knew about this planned insurrection and why it happened, one thing is clear: our elected officials have a duty to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Donald Trump from office, effective immediately, as a result of this disgrace.
As Americans, we are extremely lucky that Donald Trump is an unintelligent, bloviating windbag — if he wasn’t, this sedition attempt would have succeeded, and we’d be living in true fascism. But if we don’t hold Trump accountable for the Capitol Putsch, the next Trump will be far more ruthlessly intelligent — and successful — in his insurrection.
