COLUMN: The 25th Amendment: That Loaded Gun That No One Has Ever Dared to Take Down from the Wall

Bernie Sanders didn’t mince words—as usual

Bernie Sanders, 83, an independent senator from Vermont, responded within hours. For a man who has been fighting against U.S. wars in the Middle East for fifty years, Trump’s message came as no surprise—it was a confirmation. Sanders had voted against the authorization of military force in Iraq in 2002. Twenty-three years later, he watched as a president threatened another Middle Eastern country, this time without even going through Congress. Without even uttering a complete sentence.

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut and member of the Foreign Relations Committee, also questioned the president’s mental health. Melanie Stansbury, a representative from New Mexico, followed suit. Within hours, the phrase “25th Amendment” went from being a constitutional taboo to a trending topic on social media. The rhetorical dam that had protected the presidency from any public psychiatric scrutiny began to crack.

When elected officials from three different generations, representing three different states, arrive at the same diagnosis on the same day—that’s no longer partisan coordination. It’s an immune response.

And then there was Marjorie Taylor Greene

That’s when the story shifts from the predictable to the dizzying. Marjorie Taylor Greene—the Georgia congresswoman who wore a MAGA hat on Capitol Hill, who defended Trump after January 6, who called his trials “political persecution”—Marjorie Taylor Greene has called into question Donald Trump’s mental health. Trumpism’s former loudest, most visible, and most loyal ally watched the Easter message and saw what everyone else sees: a man who is not well.

And yet, no one ran a major headline on it. Newsrooms treated Greene’s reaction as a minor detail in a list of reactions. As if the defection of the most devoted soldier in an army were nothing more than an anecdote. When your Praetorian Guard backs away, it’s not a dissenting opinion. It’s a seismic signal. Greene isn’t defending the Constitution—she’s protecting her political survival. If even she calculates that it’s more dangerous to remain loyal than to distance herself, the calculus has just changed for everyone.

Section 4: The Most Powerful Mechanism Ever Left Unused

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The president may challenge this determination. Congress then decides by a two-thirds majority in both chambers. The mechanism is precise. It is written into the Constitution. And it has never been invoked in its 58 years of existence.

Never. Not for Ronald Reagan after Hinckley’s shooting in 1981, when his own Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, declared himself “in charge.” Not for Woodrow Wilson after his stroke in 1919, when his wife Edith ran the country from a bedroom for seventeen months—but the amendment didn’t exist yet. Not for Trump himself on January 6, 2021, when cabinet members discussed invoking it for a few feverish hours before backing down.

The 25th Amendment is the gun hanging on the wall in the first act. Chekhov said it had to go off before the end of the play. We’re now in the fourth act. The gun is still on the wall. And the room is starting to smell of gunpowder.

Why It Won’t Be Invoked—and Why That Tells Us Everything

Vice President JD Vance would have to initiate the process. JD Vance, who owes his position to Trump, who publicly switched sides to secure the nomination, who compared Trump to Hitler in 2016 before becoming his most ardent defender in 2024. The idea that Vance would trigger Section 4 is about as credible as the idea that a man would saw off the branch he’s sitting on while hanging over a canyon. And yet—that is exactly the situation the amendment’s drafters had anticipated. They simply hadn’t anticipated that personal loyalty would replace the constitutional oath.

The cabinet, next, would have to vote by majority. A cabinet appointed by Trump, confirmed by a Republican Senate, composed of loyalists selected based on the sole criterion of loyalty. Pete Hegseth at Defense. Tulsi Gabbard at National Intelligence. These are not civil servants who would risk their careers for a constitutional principle. They are courtiers who owe everything to their king. The 25th Amendment presupposes a cabinet of servants of the state. It is faced with a cabinet of servants of the president.

October 1973, a night when the world nearly came to an end

On October 24, 1973, Richard Nixon was in the thick of the Watergate scandal. He was drunk, according to several accounts, including that of his own Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. That evening, the Soviet Union threatened to intervene militarily in the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War. Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger made the decision to place U.S. forces on DEFCON 3 nuclear alert—without consulting the president. Nixon was asleep. Or drinking. Or both.

The official story says the system worked—responsible adults took charge. The real story is that the world survived that night because two unelected men decided on their own what the United States’ nuclear posture would be. No one invoked the 25th Amendment. No one even raised the question publicly. Schlesinger had issued a secret directive to military commanders: do not carry out any nuclear order from Nixon without his countersignature. A Secretary of Defense bypassing his commander-in-chief. In silence. Without any legal basis.

We live in a world where nuclear security rests not on institutions but on the hope that an adult in the room will disobey in time. That’s not a system. It’s a prayer.

2025: Where are the adults in the room?

In 1973, Kissinger and Schlesinger were cynical but competent statesmen. Who plays that role today? Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News anchor with no military command experience? Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State who hasn’t publicly contradicted a single statement by Trump since his appointment? The question isn’t rhetorical—it’s operational. If Trump posts a strike order at 3 a.m. on Truth Social, who in the chain of command distinguishes between a tweet and a presidential order?

And yet, the Constitution is clear. The president is the commander-in-chief. His authority over the nuclear arsenal requires no one’s approval. Not Congress’s. Not from Congress. Not from the Cabinet. Not from the Pentagon. One man, one code, one button. This mechanism was designed for speed in the event of a Soviet attack. It was not designed for a president who confuses a social media platform with the Situation Room.

Ormuz: The Bottleneck of the Global Economy

The Strait of Hormuz is 33 kilometers wide at its narrowest point. Commercial shipping lanes are only 3.2 kilometers wide in each direction. Every day, between 15 and 17 giant oil tankers pass through this corridor, transporting oil from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran to Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Closing the Strait of Hormuz would be like severing the femoral artery of the global economy. The price per barrel would jump from $65 to over $150 in a matter of days, according to estimates by the Brookings Institution.

Ahmad, 47, captain of a UAE-flagged oil tanker, has been sailing through the strait three times a month for the past twenty years. He told Reuters in March 2025: “When the Iranians conduct military exercises, we can see the speedboats 200 meters away. You can smell the diesel from their engines. My crew prays. Not metaphorically—they’re actually praying.” Threatening to bomb Iranian bridges and power plants is a surefire way to ensure those speedboats won’t stay in port.

One man writes an Easter message, and 21 million barrels of oil tremble. I’m searching for the right word to describe this. “Irresponsible” is too polite. “Dangerous” is too vague. “Crazy” is the word an Arizona congresswoman chose. I can’t think of a better one.

The power plants Trump wants to bomb have names

Iran has 83 major power plants, according to the International Energy Agency. The largest, Shazand, supplies electricity to Markazi Province—home to 1.4 million people. The Bushehr nuclear power plant, built with Russian assistance, supplies 1,000 megawatts to the national grid. Bombing this infrastructure isn’t “striking Iran.” It’s plunging hospitals into darkness. It’s shutting down ventilators. It’s cutting off drinking water to entire cities, because the pumping stations run on electricity.

Then there are the bridges. Iran has hundreds of them spanning its major rivers—the Karun, the Zayandeh, and the Dez. The Si-o-se-pol Bridge in Isfahan, built in 1602, is a designated historic monument. But Trump isn’t talking about architecture. He’s talking about military logistics. Destroying bridges means cutting off supply routes—for food, medicine, and fuel. That’s what the U.S. military did in Iraq in 2003. The Iraqis who survived the bombs died of hunger, thirst, and infections in the weeks that followed.

Twenty-four hours, no clarification

By Monday evening, 24 hours after the Easter message, no member of the Trump administration had issued a clarification. No “the president was expressing a firm but diplomatic position.” No “the United States favors the diplomatic route.” Nothing. A cabinet’s silence in the face of a threat of war constitutes a policy in and of itself. Silence implies consent—and the Trump cabinet is as silent as a tomb on which someone has engraved “America First.”

Karine Jean-Pierre, when she was Biden’s press secretary, had to clarify the president’s statements an average of three times a week. Trump’s White House in 2025 no longer clarifies anything. It lets threats float in the digital atmosphere like toxic gases, counting on habituation to neutralize the alarm. And it works. Every threat that goes unfulfilled erodes the credibility of the next one—until the day the one that really matters is ignored by everyone.

The silence of the courtiers is not loyalty. It is constitutional cowardice in real time. Every hour that passes without correction is an hour in which the world recalibrates its understanding of what the United States is willing to do.

The word the Cabinet will never utter

“Incapacity.” That is the word in Section 4. Not “disagreement.” Not “recklessness.” Incapacity. The Cabinet should certify that the president is incapable of discharging the duties of his office. Not that he is impulsive. Not that he is hot-tempered. Incapable. And that’s where the mechanism crashes against reality: between a president who threatens to bomb a country on social media and a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” there is a legal chasm that no one wants to cross. Because crossing that chasm means admitting that the system has elected someone it cannot contain.

And yet—that is exactly what the drafters of the 25th Amendment had in mind. Birch Bayh, the Indiana senator who spearheaded the amendment in 1965, had explicitly mentioned the case of a president “mentally incapable of making rational decisions.” He had foreseen the situation. He simply hadn’t anticipated that an entire party would choose to turn a blind eye.

Easter Sunday for 330 million Americans

Let’s be honest. On Sunday evening, when Trump’s message popped up in our news feeds, how many of us read the post, shook our heads, and scrolled past to the next photo? How many of us sighed, “Here we go again,” before moving on? The threat of war against a nation of 88 million people coexisted on our screens alongside Easter brunch recipes and cat videos. We all scrolled past it. The human brain isn’t designed to process a nuclear threat between two Instagram Stories.

That’s exactly what Trump is counting on: habituation, attention fatigue, and normalization through repetition. In 2017, when he threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” the markets plummeted, editorials screamed, and the world held its breath. In 2025, he threatens to bomb Iran, and the Dow Jones lost only 0.3% the next day. The stock market has factored the madness into its risk models. So have we.

We’ve become professional spectators of collapse. We watch a man threaten to start a war from his phone, and our first reaction is to check whether the market has moved. That’s not resilience. It’s numbness.

What Your Scrolling Cost

While you were scrolling, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) was adjusting the positions of its carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf. While you were scrolling, Iranian diplomats were trying to reach Omani intermediaries to find out if the threat was real. While you were scrolling, families in Bandar Abbas—a port city of 500,000 at the entrance to the strait—were filling jerry cans with water. Your scrolling is not innocent. It’s part of the system that allows a social media post to become foreign policy by default.

The democratic contract requires attentive citizens. Citizens who react when a red line is crossed. But when the red line is crossed every Tuesday, it disappears. There is no longer a line. There is a spectrum. And within that spectrum, the difference between “aggressive rhetoric” and “a call to war” becomes invisible—until it is no longer so.

Not “Is he capable?” but “Who decides if he isn’t?”

The real question isn’t whether Donald Trump is mentally fit to serve as president. Psychiatrists will debate this for years without reaching a consensus, shielded by the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, which has prohibited remote diagnoses since 1973. The real question is structural: who has the actual power to remove a sitting president from office, and why is it structurally impossible to exercise that power?

The 25th Amendment entrusts this responsibility to the very people most accountable to the president himself: his vice president and his cabinet. It’s like entrusting the diagnosis of alcoholism to the bartender. The mechanism is self-immunized against its own activation. The Founding Fathers feared the tyranny of a king. They had not imagined the tyranny of an office—an office that renders everyone around it incapable of saying no, because saying no means losing everything they have gained by saying yes.

The 25th Amendment is a weapon of last resort entrusted to the very people who have the most to lose by using it. It’s a design flaw, not a mystery. And every year that passes without reform makes the next crisis more likely and the solution more impossible.

The Ghost of Section 4

Fifty-eight years. That’s how old Section 4 is. In fifty-eight years, the United States has had presidents who underwent surgery under general anesthesia (Reagan, Bush Jr.), a president whose cognitive abilities were publicly questioned (Biden), and a president who attempted to overturn an election (Trump, on January 6, 2021). Zero invocations. The number itself is a diagnosis—not of the president, but of the system.

Senator Birch Bayh died in 2019 at the age of 91. He never saw his amendment used. In his final interviews, he expressed his “concern” that the mechanism had become “too politically costly to activate.” He was right. The political cost of invoking the amendment has become greater than the existential cost of inaction. And in this twisted arithmetic, inaction always wins—until the day it loses everything.

When the Most Loyal of the Loyal Takes a Step Back

Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected in 2020 to represent Georgia’s 14th district with 74.7% of the vote. Her political identity is inextricably linked to Trump. She has worn T-shirts bearing his image in Congress. She has defended the rioters of January 6. She has called Trump’s trials “Soviet-style persecution.” This woman doesn’t doubt Trump out of Democratic conviction—she doubts him out of a survival instinct. And that’s why her reaction matters more than that of Sanders or Murphy.

When an ideological ally questions your sanity, it’s an opinion. When your most loyal soldier questions your sanity, it’s an evacuation signal. Greene doesn’t read the Constitution at night—she reads the polls. And what she’s reading right now is that a social media threat of war on Easter Sunday is costing her voters in the suburban counties she needs to hold onto. Loyalty comes at a price. The Easter message just raised the bill.

Greene’s doubts about Trump are like the canary falling in the coal mine. It’s not a moral conversion. It’s a toxic gas detector going off. And when the canary falls, smart miners get out.

The Political Calculus Behind the Dissidence

The midterm elections will take place in November 2026. Eighteen months from now. Every Republican elected in a competitive district is doing a silent calculation: how many inflammatory posts can I make before the independents in my district flip? In 2018, Republicans lost 40 seats in the House. In 2022, the candidates most aligned with Trump underperformed by an average of 5 points in swing districts, according to the Cook Political Report. The threat of war against Iran doesn’t go over well in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It doesn’t go over well in Scottsdale. It doesn’t go over well where elections are won.

Greene knows this. The others know it, too. But between knowing and acting lies fear—fear of Trump himself, of his ability to destroy a political career with a single post, of his punitive primaries where he pits loyalist candidates against dissidents. Fear is the glue that holds Trumpism together. Not ideology. Not conviction. Fear.

The Day of the Power Plants—or the Day of the Bluff

Tuesday, April 22, 2025. That’s the day Trump has set. Either Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz—which presupposes that it has closed it, which is only partially true, since Tehran has slowed traffic without blocking it entirely—or the bombs will fall. That’s the ultimatum. Except that an ultimatum requires credibility. And Trump’s credibility when it comes to military threats is a bank account seriously overdrawn.

In June 2019, Trump ordered strikes against Iran following the destruction of a U.S. drone, only to call off the operation ten minutes before it was to be carried out—according to his own account. The planes were in the air. The pilots had their coordinates. Ten minutes. Qassem Soleimani was killed in January 2020, to be sure, but by a targeted drone strike, not by a bombing of civilian infrastructure. The difference between a targeted assassination and the destruction of power plants is the difference between a scalpel and an axe.

The problem with the boy who cried wolf is that the story always ends the same way: the wolf eventually comes. And on that day, no one is listening anymore.

Tuesday’s Three Scenarios

Scenario 1: Nothing happens. Trump declares victory, claiming that his “firmness” forced Iran to back down, even though nothing has changed. The markets rebound. The world sighs in relief. And the next threat will be a little more violent, a little more specific, a little more credible—because that’s how escalation works. Scenario 2: Limited strikes. Military targets, presented as “proportionate.” Iran strikes back through its proxies—Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis. Oil prices jump to $120. The escalation begins. Scenario 3: Power plants and bridges. Massive strikes on civilian infrastructure. Iran completely closes the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices top $200. The global economy enters a recession. And here we are.

None of these scenarios has been publicly discussed by Congress. No hearings. No votes. No authorization to use force. One man, one phone call, one Tuesday.

Easter Sunday in Arizona, Easter Sunday in Isfahan

Yassamin Ansari spent her Easter Sunday in her Arizona district, juggling community events and a family dinner. 10,000 kilometers away, in Isfahan, Parisa put her daughter to bed, wondering if the power plant that supplies their neighborhood would still be there on Wednesday. The two women have nothing in common except a man and his phone. One is calling for his removal. The other is buying candles.

The 25th Amendment will not be invoked. Vance will not budge. The administration won’t budge. Republicans in Congress will keep their heads down and wait for the media cycle to move on. And we’ll keep scrolling. We’ll scroll until the next message, until the next threat, until the day when scrolling is no longer enough to put distance between us and what’s happening.

This isn’t an article about Trump. This isn’t an article about the 25th Amendment. This is an article about a rifle hanging on the wall of a democracy—loaded, oiled, ready—that no one will take down, because taking it down would be tantamount to admitting that we need it.

The wall, the rifle, and us

The rifle is on the wall. The bullets are in the chamber. Ansari pointed at it. Sanders pointed at it. Greene herself looked in its direction. No one will take it down. Not because it doesn’t work. Because taking it down would mean that the most powerful person in the world is also the most dangerous. And no American institution is designed to absorb that truth.

Somewhere in Isfahan, Parisa placed a new candle on the kitchen table. Her daughter asked her why. She replied, “Just in case.” Two words. All the terror in the world fits into two words spoken by a mother who doesn’t know if the lights will come back on Wednesday.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist