Tucker Carlson says the constitutional tool used when a president is unfit for office should be used on President Trump. In a new NPR interview, the ex-Fox News host told Steve Inskeep that Trump’s recent nuclear-tinged rhetoric on Iran warrants removal under the 25th Amendment, not just impeachment, per Mediaite. “It’s enough for me to say he should be removed from office. He should have been removed from office by his own Cabinet secretaries the moment he threatened a nuclear attack,” Carlson said.
Asked if he was explicitly invoking the 25th Amendment—which lets the vice president and Cabinet sideline a president deemed unable to perform his duties—Carlson replied, “That’s correct. He should’ve been bundled up and taken out.” In a United Nations address this week, Trump warned he could “annihilate” Iran if the conflict continues, framing the choice as either a deal that lets Tehran rebuild or a move to “drive them into hell, with no chance of survival.” He didn’t mention the use of nuclear weapons specifically.
Carlson noted in the NPR interview: “Here you have a guy threatening to eliminate the human race and that’s not considered a crime? It tells you how deranged our moral scale has become.” Carlson said that during a meeting he had with Trump earlier this year, when he brought up his concerns about Iran with the president, the latter replied, “In the end, we all die anyway,” per NPR.
The Independent notes the few times that the 25th has been invoked, including when President Reagan transferred his presidential powers to VP George Bush in 1985 as he underwent surgery for a bowel tumor. George W. Bush did the same as president, handing over the reins to VP Dick Cheney twice when he had colonoscopies in 2002 and 2007. Vice President Kamala Harris became the first woman in US history to assume the powers of the presidency in 2021, when President Biden left her in charge during his own colonoscopy.