We Need to Talk About the 25th Amendment.

I was the first sitting GOP congressman to call for the 25th Amendment in 2021. What’s happening now scares me just as much.

By Adam Kinzinger - Sep 2

In our nation’s darkest hours of Trump’s war with Iran, he took to Truth Social and revealed a different side to his distorted view of reality.

Sunday night, the President of the United States sat somewhere with a phone in his hand and posted an AI-generated video to Truth Social that showed an airman’s view out of a cockpit window as explosions rip across an oil field below. The caption, in his own words: “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT”

Kharg Island is real. It processes roughly ninety percent of Iran’s oil exports and is home to nearly twenty thousand people, most of them oil workers. It is also, as of Sunday night, not the place where anything actually happened.

The real strikes that day hit Iranian minelaying forces and rocket launchers near the Strait of Hormuz, more than four hundred miles away. Iran responded by firing ballistic missiles at two American bases in Jordan; Jordanian air defenses intercepted them before anyone was hurt. That is the actual war. Real ships, real minefields, real missiles arcing toward real Americans in real time.

And the Commander in Chief spent that night generating a fantasy version of it for his own feed.

I am not a doctor. But I am a twenty-year Air Force veteran who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, I served twelve years in Congress, and I sat on the committee that investigated January 6th. I have spent a long time studying exactly how this president behaves under pressure, in war, and at the edges of his own judgment.

And I am telling you, as plainly as I know how, that what happened Sunday night belongs to a pattern that should worry every single American, regardless of party.

Because this isn’t the first time. In April, he posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ, then deleted it after even his own allies recoiled in horror. A few weeks later he was posting AI photos of himself and his Cabinet swimming in the repainted Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Around the same time, fabricated images of him posing with John F. Kennedy and “saving” George Washington made their way onto his feed. And just last month, before Sunday’s post, he was already circulating AI images of Kharg Island being bombarded.

This is not a man occasionally reaching for a meme. This is a sitting president who, with increasing frequency, appears to be narrating his reality through imagery he invented rather than through what is actually happening on the ground.

Here is why that scares me:

The 25th Amendment exists for exactly one purpose: a mechanism for the country to keep functioning when the person holding the nuclear codes is, for whatever reason, unable to reliably discharge the duties of the office.

We have used it before for something as routine as a colonoscopy, transferring power to the Vice President for the length of an anesthesia. We built an entire constitutional process around the idea that even a few hours of impaired judgment at the top is too dangerous to leave unaddressed.

And yet we have now watched this president attempt to overturn an election, survive two impeachments, and generate fictional footage of an active war he is actually prosecuting and not once has that mechanism so much as been whispered about by the people with the actual authority to invoke it.

President George W. Bush formally implemented Section 3 twice, in 2002 and 2007, while he underwent anesthesia for routine medical procedures.

I know something about being the first to say this out loud. On January 7th, 2021, the day after the Capitol was stormed, I became the first Republican in Congress to call for the 25th Amendment to be invoked. I said it with a heavy heart because a line had been crossed that our country could never go back from.

I said at the time that the president had become unmoored, not just from his duty, not just from his oath, but from reality itself. I took no pleasure in saying it then, but I said it then because I believed the country needed someone at the helm who was tethered to what was actually happening, and because our enemies were watching to see whether we would do anything about it when one of our own cast aside our Constitution.

Our enemies, especially Iran, are watching again. So is every adversary calculating whether an American president’s public statements bear any relationship to American military reality. When the Commander in Chief cannot distinguish, in public, on the record, between a real strike and a video generated for effect, some on his staff will call it a messaging problem. In reality, it’s a fitness problem, and it’s exactly what the 25th Amendment was written to address.

Adam Kinzinger
@RepKinzinger

It’s with a heavy heart I am calling for the sake of our Democracy that the 25th Amendment be invoked. My statement:

But the Constitution does not let me, or likely anyone reading this piece, invoke it. It requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to take action. It requires initiative from the people who see him every day, who brief him, who watch him up close in ways the rest of us cannot. They are the only ones with the authority to act, and so far, every one of them has chosen silence.

Donald Trump has proven over and over again that he is not fit to be President of The United States. While it is unlikely that those around the president will suddenly have a change of heart, we cannot let the people of this country forget that what we are seeing is exactly what the 25th Amendment was created for.