Tucker Carlson says Trump’s Cabinet must remove him from office under the 25th Amendment
Tucker Carlson has called for President Donald Trump to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment.
Carlson made the comment on Thursday during an interview on NPR’s Newsmakers podcast. Though Carlson has long been a public supporter of Trump, he has been particularly critical of the president’s war in Iran.
“He’s not going to be punished for it. They’ll get him on corruption or whatever,” Carlson told NPR when asked if Trump should face impeachment over the war.
He said that Trump should have been removed from office “by his own Cabinet secretaries the moment he threatened a nuclear attack.”
NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Carlson if he was referring to the use of the 25th Amendment.
“That’s correct. He should have been bundled up and taken out. That’s a crime. There’s no greater crime than that,” Carlson said.
The former Fox News host did allow some room for a conspiracy theory — that perhaps Trump wasn’t the one who ultimately made the decision to join Israel in its attack on Iran.
“I don’t think he had the latitude to make this decision on his own,” Carlson said.
There is no credible evidence to suggest anyone other than Trump led the U.S. into its current quagmire with Tehran.
The 25th Amendment gives the vice president and the Cabinet secretaries the power to forcibly remove a president who cannot fulfill the duties of the office or who acts in direct violation of those duties.
The amendment has been used primarily as a means of temporarily transferring power when a president is medically incapacitated.
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan — facing a tumor removal surgery after being diagnosed with bowel cancer — invoked Section 3 of the 25th Amendment and transferred power to his then-Vice President George H W Bush.
In 2002 and 2007, George W Bush similarly transferred his power to Vice President Dick Cheney before scheduled colonoscopies.
The most recent invocation was in 2021, when President Joe Biden transferred his power to Vice President Kamala Harris before he underwent a colonoscopy. It marked the first time in U.S. history that a woman took on the duties of the presidency.
