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Tucker Carlson has called for President Donald Trump to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment.
Carlson made the comment during an interview on NPR’s Newsmakers podcast, which was published on Thursday. Though Carlson was a longtime public supporter of Trump, he has since turned against him and has been particularly critical of the president’s war in Iran.
“He’s not going to be punished for it. They’ll get him on corruption or whatever,” Carlson told NPR when asked if Trump should face impeachment over the war.
He said that the president should have been removed from office “by his own Cabinet secretaries the moment he threatened a nuclear attack.”
NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Carlson if he was referring to the use of the 25th Amendment.
President Donald Trump embraces former Fox News host Tucker Carlson during a 2024 event in Arizona (AFP/Getty)
“That’s correct. He should have been bundled up and taken out. That’s a crime. There’s no greater crime than that,” Carlson said.
The former Fox News host suggested that Trump wasn’t the one who ultimately made the decision to join Israel in its attack on Iran.
“I don’t think he had the latitude to make this decision on his own,” Carlson said.
The 25th Amendment gives the vice president and the Cabinet secretaries the power to forcibly remove a president who cannot fulfill the duties of the office or who acts in direct violation of those duties.
The amendment, introduced in 1965, has been used as a means of temporarily transferring power when a president is briefly medically incapacitated.
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan — facing a tumor removal surgery after being diagnosed with bowel cancer — invoked Section 3 of the 25th Amendment and transferred power to his then-Vice President George H W Bush. In 2002 and 2007, George W Bush similarly transferred his power to Vice President Dick Cheney before scheduled colonoscopies.
The most recent invocation was in 2021, when President Joe Biden transferred his power to Vice President Kamala Harris before he underwent a colonoscopy. It marked the first time in U.S. history that a woman took on the duties of the presidency.
During his term, Biden faced repeated calls from Republican lawmakers to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment, including from Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Reps. Clay Higgins, Chip Roy and Claudia Tenney.
Carlson’s call is for Section 4 to be invoked, and for those in power around Trump to force him out over his threats to “annihilate” Iran.
Trump sits for an interview with Carlson, during the podcaster’s live tour in 2024 (Getty)
“Here you have a guy threatening to eliminate the human race and that’s not considered a crime?!” Carlson said of Trump. “It tells you how deranged our moral scale has become. So he should be removed from office for threatening first-use nuclear strike.”
It’s not the first time there’s been a call for Trump’s removal from office. Following the Capitol riot in 2001, the House Democrats and lone Republican cross-over, former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, approved a non-binding resolution urging then Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the president.
Pence said prior to the vote he was opposed to invoking the 25th Amendment, arguing that its purpose is for replacing presidents who are unable to carry out their duties, not as a means of disciplining presidents.
Carlson is also not the only conservative media figure who has demanded Trump be ousted from the Oval Office. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — both former Trump boosters — called for the president to be removed using the 25th Amendment earlier this year.
Jones’ call was, like Carlson’s, a response to Trump’s rhetoric surrounding his war with Iran.
“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Jones asked on his InfoWars broadcast in April.
“The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people!” Jones wrote on X, following Trump’s threats to eliminate Iranian civilization in April. “Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!”
Greene also called for his removal around the same time.
“Not a single bomb has dropped on America,” the former Republican congresswoman wrote on social media at the time. “We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
Despite his previous frequent boosting of Trump, particularly during his time with Fox News, texts Carlson sent that were made public when Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for defamation following the 2020 election included him, two days before the Capitol riot, saying he hated Trump “passionately” and was excited for him to leave office.
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” Carlson said in a text. “I hate him passionately. … I can’t handle much more of this.”
Trump and Carlson publicly made up in 2023. Carlson said at the time that he “loves” Trump. He changed his tune again earlier this year, however, when he publicly apologized for helping to get Trump elected.
“I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional,” Carlson said during a podcast episode featuring his brother, Buckley, who had written speeches for Trump during his 2015 campaign. “You and I, and everyone else who supported him, I mean you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him—I mean we’re implicated in this for sure.”