MIKEY SMITH: How Americans can remove Donald Trump from office if he keeps getting more unhinged

Donald Trump’s second presidency is troubling for many reasons.

There’s the democratic backsliding - appointing Elon Musk to a nebulous, unaccountable position, shutting down government projects and departments at whim and taking revenge against his political enemies and those who have held him to account.

There’s the absence of any ‘grown-ups’ in the room - any moderating voices to soothe his worst urges.

There’s the arbitrary detention and rendition of migrants, lawful residents - even green card holders - without due process or appeal, often to brutal Salvadoran gulags.

Let’s not forget the crypto coin he launched the day before he became President - through which he’s enriched himself by potentially billions of dollars while sitting in the Oval Office.

Then there’s the havoc he’s wreaked on global finances - through his erratic, arbitrary tariff plan and on-again-off-again pauses and tweaks, denying markets and businesses the stability they need.

And there’s his repeated, unfounded claims that the 2020 election was in some way rigged, and that he was the rightful president all along while - who legitimately beat him, heavily - was in the White House.

He ousted the country’s most senior generals before the end of their normal term.

On top of all this, there’s the lingering memory of how his first presidency ended - not with a peaceful transfer of power, but with a violent attempted coup d’etat, where thousands of his supporters, energised by a speech instructing them to resist the result of the election and “fight like hell”, stormed the US Capital with the express intent of overturning the election result.

And if you think is going to leave the White House voluntarily when his second term is up, you may be sorely disappointed. He repeatedly talks about a “third term” - musing about how one could come about, despite it being obviously illegal and unconstitutional.

These are not normal times. This is not a normal presidency. We’re still in the first 100 days - but it’s not unreasonable to ask how it might be brought to an end.

Here’s how that could happen.

The normal way

The normal way to remove a president from office, especially when they’re in their second term, is very simple. Wait four years.

In a normal presidency, the election cycle starts about half way through - with a primary process kicking off in the final year to pick each party’s candidate.

And then it’s straightforward - if Americans don’t like one candidate, they can vote for the other.

But as we’ve outlined above, this is not a normal presidency.

Trump has repeatedly indicated he wants to stay in office beyond the end of his second term. It’s been suggested that even if he’s not allowed to run again, there might be a /Dmitry Medvedev situation where JD Vance runs, and if he wins he just lets Trump take over.

There’s some that think the 25th Amendment (more of which later) could allow a vice president to legally be elevated to the Presidency for a third term - because the language of the Constitution only bars Presidents from being “elected” more than twice. So JD Vance runs with Trump as his VP, gets elected, invokes the 25th Amendment to step down and lets Trump become president again.

But yeah, waiting and voting is really what everyone’s still hoping for. The rest of this article is going to explore the what-ifs. What if he won’t leave? What if he tries some of the chicanery above? What if this is an even more abnormal Presidency than we feared?

Congress

There’s two ways you can force a President from office mid-term.

The most well known is Impeachment. And Trump is already the most impeached man in the history of the Presidency.

The process goes roughly thus: The House of Representatives brings impeachment charges. If they’re adopted by representatives on a simple majority vote, the President is impeached.

The Senate then holds an impeachment trial - a full-on courtroom style trial examining whether the President has committed the fabled “high crimes and misdemeanours”.

There would then need to be a two-thirds majority in a Senate vote to convict. No President has ever been convicted. Presidents Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (twice) were all acquitted by the Senate.

Next, let’s look at the maths.

Currently there are 220 Republicans and 213 Democrats in the House. Two Democrat representatives died in March. They’ll be replaced through special elections in September and November, and are both expected to stay Democrat.

So the Democrats, at this point, would have to convince six Republicans to vote to impeach - which you might think isn’t that big a deal. But many of these representatives come from deep red states, where Trump remains inexplicably popular.

And even if they voted to impeach, they need a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict. There are currently 53 Republicans in the Senate and 45 Democrats - with two independent Democrats making it 100.

So to get to the 67 votes you would most likely need to convict, Democrats would have to convince 20 senators to rebel against the President, and frankly, good luck with that.

The next chance to shake up the House and Senate is in November 2026, when Midterm Elections take place. Regaining a majority in both houses will be top of the agenda for the Democrats, but the chances of a supermajority in the Senate are slim.

The Constitution

The second legal way to remove a President is through the constitution.

The 25th Amendment sets out how a President can leave office before the end of his or her term - either voluntarily or not.

A President can resign, invoking section 1 of the 25th Amendment, to transfer power to the Vice President. This is what Nixon did.

They can invoke section 3, which temporarily transfers power to the VP until the President declares in writing that they are able to resume their duties - as famously seen in the West Wing.

Section 4 allows for the involuntary removal of the President. If the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet agree the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his or her office, they can write to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives - and immediately take power as Acting President.

Easy, right? No. The Senate then has to confirm the decision - with a two-thirds majority. Which might be a little easier if you’ve already got the VP and cabinet on side, but is still a massive hurdle.

Now…here’s why even impeaching the President, or having him declared unfit might not actually get rid of Trump…

The line of succession

If the President is removed from office, it does not trigger an election.

In an odd echo of the revolutionary Americans were keen to rid themselves of when they declared independence, power automatically transfers to the next in the line of succession.

So if Trump was removed, you get JD Vance - and there’s every chance Vance just puts Trump back in the White House - either officially or as an “advisor” running things behind the scenes.

So what if you get rid of JD Vance too? Then it goes to the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.

Mike Johnson is every bit as mad as JD Vance, and equally sycophantic towards Trump.

Get rid of him and it goes to Chuck Grassley, the President pro tempore of the Senate - another Republican.

The elephant in the Oval Office

So now we’ve established that impeachment and the 25th Amendment are really no good to nobody, we’ve got to address another ‘what if’ that nobody’s really ready to talk about yet - but which we have to accept is a real possibility.

What if he just won’t leave?

When his term’s up. If he’s impeached and convicted. If the 25th amendment kicks in.

What if he refuses? What if he stares down the electorate, Congress, the Supreme Court and hundreds of years of precedent and procedure and just says…”No.”

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We only think this is a crazy idea that will never happen because it never has. But until 2021, no outgoing President had denied the result of a legitimate election, branding it corrupt and deliberately rigged against him - and continued to do so for years, despite being proven wrong.

Until 2021 no President had ever stood on the Ellipse and told his followers to march on the Capital and “fight like hell”.

January 6th was an attempted coup, inspired by the sitting President. He was only talked down from it when the better angels of his administration convinced him to back off.

And as we mentioned earlier, there are no sensible people left in his administration.

If past is prologue, whatever prompts the official end of Trump’s presidency, the actual end of his Presidency is probably going to involve his refusing to accept the normal order of things. And there’s every chance that leads to violence.

And if you let yourself think that thought to its conclusion, you enter the wild realm of wondering whether the Generals do their duty and remove him by force. And even if they do, whether their success depend on Trump not raising an army of his own - and if you don’t think there are dozens of militia across America who would raise a banner and bear arms for their guy at his order, you haven’t been paying attention.

Don’t panic. As we said, there are a LOT of what ifs before you get to here. The point is that Donald Trump is not a normal President, and these are not normal times.