Is 25 amendment invoked in USA against trump
Executive summary
The 25th Amendment has been repeatedly discussed as a route to remove Donald Trump, most prominently after the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack and again in 2025 after controversial remarks, but it has never actually been invoked to involuntarily remove a president — including against Trump [1] [2] [3].
1. What the 25th Amendment is and how it works
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, provides rules for presidential succession and for temporary or permanent transfer of presidential power when a president is "unable to discharge the powers and duties" of the office; it contains both a voluntary transfer mechanism (Section 3) used briefly for routine medical procedures and an involuntary process (Section 4) that requires the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president incapacitated and, if contested, a congressional decision—an intentionally rigorous, political-legal procedure described in the constitutional text and congressional commentaries [4] [5].
2. Calls to invoke it against Trump: history of pressure, not invocation
Following the January 6, 2021, insurrection, numerous Democrats and some Republicans urged Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to use Section 4 to remove President Trump, and congressional leaders explored the possibility as an alternative or complement to impeachment; similar public calls resurfaced in 2025 after remarks that prompted Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and others to urge invocation, and commentators and institutions — from Brookings to state governors — have advocated activation at various moments [6] [7] [3] [8] [9].
3. Has the 25th Amendment been invoked against Trump? No — and that matters
Despite repeated public and institutional calls, Section 4 — the clause permitting involuntary removal — has never been successfully invoked against any president, and it was not used to remove Trump in 2021 or afterward in the episodes documented by press and legal analysis; presidents have used Section 3 voluntarily for medical procedures, but the involuntary mechanism remains unused in U.S. history [1] [2] [4].
4. Why invocation against a sitting president is difficult — legal and political barriers
Invoking Section 4 requires the vice president plus a majority of Cabinet secretaries to conclude the president is unable to serve and to transmit that declaration to Congress; if the president disputes it, Congress must decide within fixed timelines by a two‑thirds vote in both houses — a high bar that mixes legal uncertainty and raw political calculus, which is why scholars, commentators and lawmakers have described invocation as feasible in theory but extraordinarily fraught in practice [10] [5] [1].
5. The debate’s implicit agendas and competing lenses
Calls to invoke the 25th on Trump have come from partisan actors and civic institutions with differing aims — some motivated by perceived immediate danger to constitutional order, others by political opposition — and reporting and advocacy often frame the Amendment either as an emergency safety valve or as a dangerous, partisan power grab; source material from think tanks, state officials and news outlets shows both urgent warnings and cautionary notes about precedent and abuse [7] [3] [11].
6. Bottom line: what the record shows and what remains open
The public record in these sources shows persistent advocacy for using the 25th Amendment against Trump at several points but no invocation that removed him; legal scholars and institutional analyses underscore that while the Amendment exists to address presidential incapacity, its involuntary application is untested and politically uphill — the factual answer, based on the cited reporting and constitutional commentary, is that it has not been invoked to remove Donald Trump [1] [4] [10].