Donald Trump on Saturday floated changing the 25th Amendment to allow Congress to impeach a vice president for covering up a president’s incapacity less than two months after President Joe Biden exited the 2024 contest amid concerns about his age and acuity.
“I will support modifying the 25th Amendment to make clear that if a vice president lies or engages in a conspiracy to cover up the incapacity of the president of the United States — if you do that with a cover-up of the president of the United States, it’s grounds for impeachment immediately and removal from office, because that’s what they did,” the former president said during a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin.
The former president has repeatedly, and without evidence, accused Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats more broadly of covering up the state of Biden’s health — particularly his mental fitness — after the president’s disastrous June debate performance that ultimately led to his exit from the race. Some Republicans in Congress had called for invoking the 25th Amendment, which provides a process to take power away from a sitting president, to remove Biden after the debate — the same rule Democrats attempted to wield against Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. But changing a Constitutional amendment, as Trump is now suggesting, is highly unlikely to actually occur.
Trump’s remarks on Saturday are also the latest sign of his continued struggle to adjust to running against a new opponent. Trump has repeatedly lamented the change at the top of the Democratic ticket, and has at times even appeared to confuse who he is competing against.
“If he didn’t go to that debate, he’d still be running,” Trump told his rally crowd.
Trump’s return to Wisconsin, a key battleground state he lost to Biden in 2020 and where polling averages show he is narrowly trailing Harris, comes as his campaign drills down in the seven core battleground states on an electoral map that appears to be shrinking for the former president.
Harris, meanwhile, made an appearance at a spice store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she is preparing largely out of public view for her debate Tuesday against Trump. There, she told reporters she was “honored” to have the endorsements of Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney. Both recently said that they’d back Harris.
“They both, as leaders who are well respected, are making an important statement — that it’s OK and important to put country above party, and I’m honored to have their support,” Harris said.
Trump slammed the senior Cheney as an “irrelevant RINO” and blasted his daughter for her involvement with the House’s Jan. 6 committee in a Friday post on his Truth Social platform, but did not mention the endorsements during his Saturday rally.
Instead, in a speech that was meant to focus on “draining the swamp,” Trump pledged to “cut the fat out of our government” by creating a “government efficiency” commission — an idea he endorsed earlier this week that was first raised by ally Elon Musk. He repeated his vow to cut 10 federal regulations for every new one. And he again called to dismantle the Department of Education.
But, in typical Trump fashion, the former president veered into other topics — and off script. He misleadingly claimed sentencing in his hush-money case was delayed until after the election “because everyone realizes that there’s no case because I did nothing wrong.” (Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts.)
He joked that he was “very offended” by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent mock endorsement of Harris. He also claimed, without evidence, that Colorado would be “taken over” by migrants if he didn’t win the state in November. And he called it a “great miracle” that Biden “won” the 2020 election — an acknowledgment of his own defeat four years ago.
As the Harris campaign on Saturday released new television advertisements reminding voters that Trump has taken credit for overturning Roe v. Wade — spots that will air in Wisconsin and other battleground states — the former president continued his attempts to thread a difficult needle on the issue. Trump said he did a “great thing” by appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who returned abortion matters to states and he decried allowing the procedure later in pregnancy. But he also expressed support for exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother.
“I happen to go with the exceptions,” Trump said. “You have to go with your heart.”
