Democrats submit bill to invoke 25th Amendment against President Trump
Democrats are trying to invoke the 25th Amendment against President Donald Trump.
- Critics have pointed to Trump’s recent statements, including threats against Iran and social media posts, as evidence of erratic behavior.
- Recent polls show that a majority of Americans, including many independents and some Republicans, think President Trump has become more erratic as he ages.
- The White House and President Trump’s remaining allies have dismissed those concerns, contrasting Trump’s energy with that of former President Joe Biden.
President Donald Trump’s actions and comments have long led political opponents to question his mental health, but in recent weeks more people than the usual liberal suspects have accused him of being mentally unstable.
Prominent conservative commentators, from former Fox News hosts Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and podcaster Candace Owens, have suggested the president is in poor health.
“I really think we need to test his mental competency,” Marjorie Taylor Greene said on CNN International on April 15.
The former Republican congressman from Georgia said he was “shocked and horrified” by the president’s recent comments, including warning that “the entire civilization will perish” and Iranians “will live in hell” if his demands are not met.
Jones, the founder of Infowars and a longtime Trump supporter, said on the March 31 episode of his new show, “The Alex Jones Show,” that Republican incumbents seeking re-election need to “cut bait” on the president by the 2026 midterm elections.
“And he babble, but you know, it sounds like his brain isn’t very active,” he said.
Mr. Owens, who has promoted racist and anti-Semitic tropes in recent years, called Mr. Trump a “genocidal maniac” in an April 7 post on X, echoing Democrats who called for the 25th Amendment to be used to remove Mr. Trump from office.
“Our Congress and our military need to intervene,” she said. “We are beyond madness.”
The comments exposed yet another raw nerve in the ongoing civil war over “Make America Great Again” over President Trump’s widespread military attacks on foreign territory.
Some former White House officials from the first Trump administration share this view.
Former White House Counsel Ty Cobb said in a March 31 interview with former CNN reporter Jim Acosta that the president is “obviously insane.”
“These screeds that come out every night highlight the level of insanity and depravity,” Cobb said. “I think he’s gone.”
President Trump slammed these MAGA media figures, accusing them of trying to generate “cheap propaganda.”
“They’re not ‘MAGA’. They’re losers and they’re just trying to hang on to MAGA,” he said in an April 9 social media post.
Most of Trump’s supporters at the Capitol support the president. Others in the online MAGA ecosystem dismissed concerns about his mental health raised by fellow conservatives.
Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who resigned from the administration in January, blasted right-wing critics on a recent episode of his podcast as “people pretending to be one of us who were fooled” by President Trump. He suggested the president’s actions were more strategic than psychotic.
“No, this is not the scope of the 25th Amendment, losers,” Bongino said. “It could be mental illness. The Baker Act is your time to talk about it, but the president isn’t. I promise you, he’s in a really good position.”
President Trump’s attitude and self-promotion are in focus
Experts say Trump has consistently fueled the MAGA movement with wildly exaggerated rhetoric.
These often long meandering, sometimes “dark” statements by Trump’s own admission, were also prominent during the 2024 campaign, such as when he suggested America needed “a really violent day” to deal with property crime.
“It’s been a tough time,” President Trump said at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on September 29, 2024. “And I mean really rough. Word gets around and it’s over quickly.”
This tendency is becoming more and more obvious in actual governance activities.
For example, during a White House Cabinet meeting in March, the president raised eyebrows when he spent five minutes joking about his love for $5 Sharpie markers. Earlier that month, while updating reporters on the Iran war, he paused mid-sentence to admire the White House curtains.
“Those curtains were my choice in my first term,” Trump said.
He has also long been known to make patently false claims, such as continuing to claim he won the 2020 presidential election and saying in an April 15 interview with Fox Business that “no other president has ever ended a war.”
President Trump said, “No one has ever ended a war.” “Who finished it? Nobody.”
Historians have noted that U.S. presidents have played important roles in ending conflicts and peace agreements, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for ending the war with Russia and Japan.
At one point during the Fox interview, host Maria Bartiromo asked about Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’ opposition to choosing Kevin Warsh to be the next Federal Reserve Chairman. President Trump said the North Carolina lawmaker is no longer in Congress.
President Trump asked, “You know Thom Tillis is no longer a senator.” “He quit.”
When Bartiromo reminded the president that Tillis was still a senator and was only up for re-election in 2026, Trump responded, “No, no, he quit, but he quit.”
But the political right’s criticism of his mental state has more to do with issuing threats in melodramatic language, such as starting an unpopular war in Iran and saying that the US would destroy all of Iran’s bridges and power plants, a potential war crime.
“Remember when I gave Iran 10 days to make a deal or open the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said in an April 4 Truth Social post. “Time is running out. Forty-eight hours left before hell has them. Glory to God!”
“It’s possible to take over an entire country overnight, and that night could be tomorrow night,” President Trump said at a press conference on April 6. Matthew Dallek, a presidential historian at George Washington University, said this kind of rhetoric has damaged his relationships with conservative media figures who have supported him in the past, despite his small departure from the anti-interventionist “America First” foreign policy ethos of his campaign.
“If Alex Jones calls you crazy, something is wrong,” Dallek said.
Jones was ordered to pay $1.4 billion in 2022 to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, who have long argued that the killings were part of a government conspiracy to steal Americans’ guns.
“I think Trump is still essentially Trump, but he’s more outraged now,” Dallek added. “He’s become a more exaggerated version of himself, which means he’s become more erratic, more confrontational, more belligerent, more extreme.”
Social media explosion fuels speculation
President Trump has touted his mental sharpness for years, calling himself a “very stable genius” in 2019. He also dismissed questions about his physical health, telling reporters on Air Force One last year that the results of an October 2025 MRI scan were “perfect,” adding that his doctor had given them “one of the best reports I’ve ever seen.”
Doctors later confirmed it was a CT scan. The White House has not yet disclosed what type of action took place or detailed consequences.
It comes across quite differently from the frail and halting appearance of former President Joe Biden, but while President Trump has always exuded confidence, he now faces questions about his mental acuity as he approaches his 80th birthday on June 14.
And Mr. Biden, whose re-election bid was scrapped due to similar concerns, is issuing a stark warning.
Mr. Trump has long had a penchant for self-aggrandizement, and this trend has become even more pronounced in his second term, with a banner featuring his portrait hanging in front of the U.S. Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. His signature was added to U.S. banknotes, starting with the $100 bill. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington will be renamed the Trump Kennedy Center.
Days after he drew backlash for posting an AI-generated image depicting himself as a Christ-like figure, the president once again took to the Truth Social platform to post a photo of himself being hugged by Jesus.
Democrats put pressure on the 25th Amendment
Democrats and their allies have already begun to attack these recent events.
At a House Education and Labor Committee hearing on April 17, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) slammed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the president’s mental state.
Takano showed a large poster with some of Trump’s online messages and asked whether Kennedy, as the nation’s top health official, would “insist” that the president undergo a mental health and emotional stability test.
“Absolutely not,” Kennedy said.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) is working toward passing a long-term bill that would create a commission to assess the president’s fitness to remain in office under the 25th Amendment. In his April 10 letter, he asked the White House physician to evaluate President Trump’s mental health.
“Experts have repeatedly warned that the President is exhibiting signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline,” Raskin said in the letter. “And in recent days, this country has seen President Trump’s public statements and abuse become increasingly incoherent, erratic, profane, deranged, and threatening.”
White House Press Secretary Davis Engle, asked about the MAGA rift and Democratic pressure, declined to comment on how the administration is responding to former allies. But he criticized the Maryland lawmaker, saying Raskin was “a stupid man’s idea of a smart man.”
“President Trump’s sharpness, unparalleled energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to the previous administration, when Democrats like Raskin deliberately concealed Joe Biden’s serious physical and mental decline from the American people,” Ingle told USA TODAY in a statement.
Poll shows Americans are also concerned about President Trump’s behavior and age
But polls show Americans are also paying attention to the president’s actions.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released in February found that about 61% of Americans said President Trump has become more erratic as he ages. Among them: 64% of independents and 30% of Republicans agreed with progressives, who described President Trump’s portrayal as “alarming” and “dangerous” given the enormous power the executive branch holds.
“This president is unfit, unwell, and mentally unstable,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in an April 7 statement. “The statements and actions we are witnessing from President Trump are not only alarming, they are dangerous.”
Civil rights groups are calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked for the first time in 117 years.
The administration and its allies have dismissed such criticism by focusing on how Trump’s energy contrasts with Biden’s physical problems, which are often attributed to the former president’s slurred speech and slow movements. White House officials regularly point out that earlier this year, President Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address in history to Congress.
However, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found fewer voters believe Trump is “mentally sharp” or “capable of handling challenges” than during the 2024 campaign. In a similar survey in September 2023, 54% of Americans agreed with this statement, compared to 45% in February 2026.
But a Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 23% of voters agreed when asked whether Biden would be mentally sharp and able to meet the challenges in July 2024, when he finally drops out of the race.
Dallek, the presidential historian, said the concerns about Biden are valid, but of a different kind compared to what voters currently have about Trump.
“With Mr. Biden, the concern was mainly about his age. It was whether he could do the job,” he said. “In Mr. Trump’s case, the primary consideration is character. The concern is not that he is old and frail, as has been expressed by critics and the public, but rather that he is energetic and insane.”
