Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The 25th Amendment: Now Serving, Hypocrisy à la Carte

Once upon a cable-news cycle, Republicans spoke of the 25th Amendment the way medieval villagers spoke of holy water: urgently, loudly, and always while pointing at Joe Biden. A mispronounced name? Fetch the Amendment. A stiff gait? Call the Cabinet. A moment of silence? Sound the constitutional alarms—democracy was apparently one shuffled step away from collapse.

Fast-forward to now, and the 25th Amendment has been quietly returned to the locked drawer labeled “Do Not Open When Our Guy Is Yelling.”

After Donald Trump’s recent ranting, grievance-soaked, reality-adjacent address—part sermon, part infomercial, part hostage video—the same crowd that once treated the 25th like a Groupon special has suddenly developed a deep, scholarly respect for “letting voters decide.” Funny how constitutional concern ages like milk the moment it applies to someone wearing a red tie.

Trump’s speech had everything: self-congratulation so exaggerated it violated several laws of physics, enemies both real and imagined, and a version of the economy apparently visible only through special MAGA goggles. According to Donald, things are going great—unless they’re not, in which case it’s obviously someone else’s fault. Immigrants, Democrats, windmills, ghosts of past indictments—take your pick. Accountability, meanwhile, has been deported without due process.

If Biden had delivered the same performance—rambling, rage-forward, untethered from verifiable reality—Fox News would have interrupted programming with a 24-hour chyron reading “25TH AMENDMENT NOW???” There would have been panels, flowcharts, concerned head tilts, and at least one former Trump official gravely explaining that this was “about patriotism, not politics.”

But now? Now we are told this is “strength.” This is “authenticity.” This is what leadership sounds like if you mistake volume for vision and anger for action.

The beauty—no, the comedy—of the moment is that the 25th Amendment was never about partisanship. It was designed for exactly what we are watching: a president who appears increasingly detached from reality, obsessed with personal grievance, and unable to distinguish between national interest and his own wounded ego. It is not a coup. It is not a conspiracy. It is literally a constitutional instruction manual titled What To Do If the President Loses the Plot.

Yet Republicans now insist the amendment is unthinkable, reckless, destabilizing. Apparently, the real threat to democracy is not a man screaming at clouds from the Resolute Desk, but the suggestion that maybe—just maybe—the grown-ups should intervene before the house is completely on fire.

So here we are, watching the same people who once begged to invoke the 25th over a stutter now argue that incoherence is charisma and delusion is determination. The amendment hasn’t changed. The behavior hasn’t improved. Only the excuses have evolved.

In the end, the question isn’t whether the 25th Amendment is appropriate. The question is whether Republicans are willing to admit what they already know but refuse to say out loud: that the standard was never competence, stability, or fitness for office.

It was always loyalty to the man—no matter how loudly, how wildly, or how unhinged he rants.

And that, ironically, is the strongest argument yet that the amendment exists for a reason.