Who can remove trump under the 25th amendment
Executive summary
The 25th Amendment provides two distinct constitutional paths that could lead to President Trump being removed or displaced: automatic succession upon death, resignation, or impeachment conviction (Section 1), and a disability/removal procedure (Section 4) in which the Vice President and a majority of the President’s Cabinet (or another body Congress has authorized) declare the President unable to discharge the office, with Congress empowered to sustain that determination by two‑thirds votes in both houses [1] [2].
1. The constitutional mechanics: what the text actually says
Section 1 makes the Vice President the President if the President is removed from office, dies, or resigns; Section 3 lets a President temporarily transfer power to the Vice President; and Section 4 authorizes the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments—or another body Congress may provide—to send written notice to congressional leaders that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office, at which point the Vice President immediately assumes the powers as Acting President [1] [2] [3].
2. Who can initiate the Section 4 process
The immediate initiators under the Amendment are the Vice President together with a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments (commonly understood as Cabinet secretaries), or with a body that Congress has by law designated as an alternative; those actors must transmit a written declaration to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House to begin the process [2] [3] [4].
3. Congress’s role and the threshold to make the transfer permanent
If the President contests the declaration, the Vice President continues as Acting President but Congress must, within 21 days after receiving the challenge declaration (or after assembling), decide the issue by a two‑thirds vote of both the House and the Senate to affirm the President’s inability—only then does the Vice President continue as Acting President; absent that two‑thirds agreement in both chambers, the President resumes the office [2] [5].
4. Practical precedents and how the amendment has been used (and not used)
Section 4 has never been used; temporary transfers under Section 3 have been employed when Presidents underwent medical procedures (for example, transfers by Reagan and George W. Bush), and Section 1’s automatic succession has been applied historically when a President resigned (Nixon) or died, but the disability/removal procedure remains untested in practice [5] [6] [1].
5. Political reality: who, in practice, controls whether the process moves forward
Although Cabinet secretaries and the Vice President are the formal triggers, the political reality is that removal under Section 4 requires the Vice President’s cooperation and a majority of the President’s Cabinet to sign on, plus the nearly insurmountable congressional supermajorities (two‑thirds in both chambers) if the President disputes the action—making the procedure constitutionally possible but politically difficult to execute [4] [5] [7].
6. Legal ambiguities, debates, and limits of available reporting
Scholars and commentators dispute the scope of “inability,” the exact role Congress may lawfully prescribe as an alternative body to the Cabinet, and how courts might intervene, and while legal scholars argue the amendment is intended to deal with a manifestly unfit president, sources show significant debate about politicization and the amendment’s safeguards; reporting documents these debates but cannot predict political choices such as whether Vice President Vance or specific Cabinet members would act in any hypothetical scenario—those are not settled facts in the cited sources [8] [4] [9].