WASHINGTON — A long-shot idea Gov. JB Pritzker and others previously floated took on new life earlier this month when Illinois Democrats joined dozens of colleagues from across the nation in demanding President Donald Trump’s closest allies remove him for being “unable” to carry out his duties.
The Republican president’s recent behavior has raised doubts even among some staunch allies, yet invoking the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment to have Trump ousted — a process that would require Vice President JD Vance, a majority of Trump’s Cabinet and supermajorities in both chambers of the Republican-controlled Congress to support ousting Trump — has almost no chance of happening short of a health crisis.
But that was never really the point.
While there’s little expectation Trump’s inner circle will turn on him, Democrats can keep Republicans on the defensive about the president’s aberrant behavior with a debate over Trump’s ability to carry out his presidential duties. The tactic is also a way to keep the spotlight on Trump’s conduct without pursuing another impeachment that, with Republicans controlling the House, would also be dead on arrival.
The most recent calls for the president’s removal are largely based on Trump’s handling of the war in Iran. U.S. forces have destroyed civilian infrastructure like schools and bridges, and Trump himself threatened via social media to end Iran’s civilization. It’s only gotten worse, with the president last weekend picking a fight with Pope Leo XIV over the war and sharing an artificial intelligence-produced image of himself as Jesus.
The episodes spurred even several prominent conservative commentators to make the same argument Pritzker pushed months ago — that the 79-year-old president is unable to serve. And as the November midterms approach, Republicans will be forced to answer for Trump’s behavior, even when the constitutional mechanisms the Democrats invoke have little chance of success.
“Americans spent (last) Tuesday wondering if Trump was about to start a nuclear war while he escalated tensions to a degree that could have had disastrous impacts on our safety and security,” U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, a Chicago Democrat, said in an emailed response to Tribune questions. “We simply cannot risk having someone that unstable leading our country.”
Quigley, whose district covers much of the North Side and several northwest suburbs, said that if Vance and the Cabinet do not act, Congress should pursue impeachment.
“This is not an either-or situation,” Quigley said. “Trump is both unable to fulfill his duties and has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Through one method or another, he must go.”
U.S. Rep. Sean Casten, a Democrat representing several western suburbs, said Trump’s threat to annihilate a country of 93 million people was “a bridge too far … bigger than Stalin, Mao and Hitler combined.”
“This is way beyond, ‘I have a difference of opinion,’” Casten said in an interview with the Tribune. “Do I think that JD Vance and the Cabinet have the character to act? No. But we need to elevate this conversation.”
Several other Illinois Democrats in the U.S. House — Jonathan Jackson, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Jan Schakowsky and Lauren Underwood — also backed invoking the amendment, as did Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, the Democratic nominee in this year’s open U.S. Senate race. Other Democrats in the delegation backed impeachment or legislation to limit Trump’s legal authority to wage war in Iran, given that the Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war.
Calls for Trump’s removal also came from unexpected corners. Former Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and conspiracy theorist commentator Candace Owens said Trump should lose his job for his handling of the Iran war — a rare moment of convergence between the left and the MAGA right.
A White House spokesperson did not address the 25th Amendment question and instead attacked Pritzker personally, blasting him for supporting state laws that protect immigrant rights.
“JB Pritzker is a slob whose soft-on-crime and pro illegal alien policies are getting the innocent citizens of the great state of Illinois killed,” said Trump spokesperson Davis Ingle in an email. “Pritzker cares more about illegal alien criminals than protecting his own citizens. He is a disgrace.”
Unclear by design
The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, partly in response to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which exposed gaps in the Constitution’s handling of presidential succession. The section Democrats are now invoking, which allows for the permanent removal of a president deemed unable to discharge his duties, has never been used. Legal scholars say that is not an accident.
“People talk about just invoking the 25th Amendment, as though that throws the president out of office. It doesn’t throw the president out of office; it temporarily transfers power to the vice president, but it gives (the president) a process for taking that power back,” said Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State University and author of “Unable: The Law, Politics, and Limits of Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.” “It stacks the deck pretty decisively in (the president’s) favor in that process.”
Even if Vance and a majority of the Cabinet notified Congress that Trump was “unable” to carry out his duties, the president could contest that finding. It would then take a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate to remove him. That’s a higher threshold than impeachment, which requires support from two-thirds of the Senate but only a simple majority of the House.
“If you come at the king, you best not miss,” Kalt said. “You’re not going to just take power away from him for a few days just so that he can get his power back but now he’s mad.”
The process is designed to keep a president at the helm, so the president doesn’t have to worry about his own appointees plotting against him, Kalt explained. That promotes stability, because the president won’t feel the need to fire subordinates to keep his job secure.
“The idea is that once you’re the president, you get to stay the president unless we have a huge bipartisan consensus,” he said.
The amendment also offers no clear definition of what it means to be “unable” to perform presidential duties. There are no physical, mental, legal or political standards provided. That ambiguity is intentional, Kalt said.
“It’s not enough to look in the dictionary and make a semantic argument that someone who is really bad at his job is ‘unable’ to do the job,” he said. “It’s saying that his own people need to want him out.”
“They didn’t want this to be a way to make an end run around the impeachment process,” he added. “It’s really only designed to work in those situations where the president is either completely incapacitated or there’s some imminent, catastrophic, irreversible crazy thing that he’s about to do.”
Steven Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, said the amendment is designed to ensure that the removal process is not used for “ordinary political disagreements.”
“What the framers have said is that the people who are close to the president are in the best position to judge whether the president is unable to discharge those powers and duties, and therefore they get the first cut at this,” he said.
A recurring question
A longtime Trump antagonist and a potential 2028 presidential candidate, Pritzker has been making the case for months, saying Trump is suffering from “dementia” and “losing it.”
“There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked,” Pritzker said last fall. Trump’s posts on Iran gave the governor a fresh opportunity to renew that argument publicly, saying the amendment should be invoked “before it’s too late.”
Asked what specifically made Pritzker think Trump is “unable” to be president, Alex Gough, a spokesperson for the governor’s reelection campaign, said, “A person who threatens to kill entire civilizations and endangers his own nation and the world every time he speaks is unable to carry out the responsibilities of the President of the United States.”
The posts were striking even by Trump’s standards.
On Easter morning, he threatened Iran with destruction if it did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, in a message underscored with profanity: “Open the (expletive) Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” Days later, he wrote, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Trump ultimately announced a ceasefire before his stated deadlines passed.
Since then, the president has continued to generate controversy. He targeted Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, accusing him of “catering to the Radical Left” and being “soft on crime,” then posted an AI-generated image of himself in a Jesus-like pose surrounded by military imagery. That post was later deleted.
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, recently demanded Trump undergo a comprehensive cognitive assessment. He noted Republicans had insisted on regular updates about President Joe Biden’s mental acuity while he was in the White House, and that Trump has routinely bragged about his performance on cognitive tests, falsely equating them to IQ tests.
“This is plainly out of the realm of normal politics,” Raskin wrote. “When the President of the United States threatens to extinguish a civilization on social media, rants about combat missions with children at the Easter Egg Roll, and drops profane tirades on Easter morning, we have indisputably entered the realm of profound medical difficulty and concern.”
Raskin also introduced legislation Tuesday to set up a body to evaluate a president’s capacity — something allowed under the 25th Amendment — that garnered 50 initial co-sponsors, including Underwood.
U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the GOP-led House Rules Committee, said last week that voters he met with during the chamber’s recent break wanted to know why Republicans in Congress were “acting like everything is just normal” under Trump.
“They’re asking, ‘What the hell is wrong with Trump? He’s obviously unwell. He’s acting like a maniac,’” McGovern said. “I’m sick and tired of Republicans acting like everything is OK, because the people back home in my district, and I think people all across the country, think he’s nuts and they want to know when Republicans are going to grow a spine and stand up to this lunatic.”
It is not the first time Trump has faced such calls. At least two Cabinet members reportedly discussed using the amendment following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, before concluding it was not a viable option. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised similar questions after Trump was hospitalized for COVID-19 weeks before the 2020 election. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found nearly half of Americans surveyed thought Trump was suffering some form of cognitive decline, and a slim majority said he is suffering from physical decline.
The debate is the point
With Republicans controlling the House, the prospects for impeachment are no better than those for the 25th Amendment.
Democrats impeached Trump twice during his first term — once for withholding military aid to Ukraine in an effort to discredit Biden and again for inciting the Jan. 6 riots — without securing a Senate conviction either time.
U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Democrat who represents parts of the West Side and several western suburbs, said impeachment is still the way to go to remove Trump from office.
“A Cabinet with a spine would’ve acted already, but Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists,” she said in a statement responding to Tribune questions. “It is up to Congress to impeach him, remove him, and ensure that he never holds public office again.”
Casten acknowledged the limits of the current effort but said the volume of constituent calls his office has received about Trump’s Iran policy reflects something real.
“They’re aware he’s up (until) 2:30 in the morning, acting like your crazy uncle, responding to Facebook posts and saying the pope is a horrible person. They see this guy is off his rocker,” Casten said.
He also pushed back on the suggestion Democrats were using the 25th Amendment debate to put Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio — both potential 2028 presidential candidates — in a politically awkward position.
“JD Vance has the charisma of a dish sponge. I’m not worried about whether or not JD Vance is a formidable candidate for president,” Casten said. “This is not about the politics of the people who are currently in the Trump Cabinet. This is about their character as Americans.”
Schwinn, the UIC law professor, said it would be a mistake to “minimize these discussions (about using the 25th Amendment) and talk about them as political grandstanding.”
“People are raising serious issues that ought to be in the public discourse,” he said. “Even if the actual removal of this president under the 25th Amendment is a remote possibility, these are legitimate, important and even necessary conversations to have in a democracy.”
Denise Poloyac, a board member of Indivisible Chicago, a grassroots progressive organization, said the goal is as much about public persuasion as constitutional procedure.
“This is not behavior that should be acceptable to anybody in this country, threatening to wipe out civilizations and (preparing) to engage in crimes against humanity, against international law and against our Constitution,” she said.
Poloyac also stressed that there is no single strategy that will keep the Trump administration in check, whether it’s pursuing the 25th Amendment or impeachment or even helping Democrats regain control of the House or Senate this November.
“I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive, and there’s just so much work being done,” she said, pointing to the large turnout for the April No Kings rallies nationwide, lawyers fighting administration policies in court or neighbors blowing whistles to prevent immigration enforcement actions. “We need to remind ourselves that none of this is normal. None of this is acceptable.”
Tribune reporter Rick Pearson contributed.