We have the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Now is the time to use it.

It's past time for Trump to be removed from office. This is a global crisis. It's time for J.D. Vance and the Cabinet to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

President Donald Trump must be removed from office.

He is manifestly unfit for office, and his continued presence in office is an existential danger to the United States of America and the world.

His Tuesday morning threat that “[a] whole civilization will die tonight,” is not the first unacceptable statement from this man — but it must be his last as president.

Vice President J.D. Vance has a moral, ethical, and constitutional obligation to invoke Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment by securing the support from a majority of the cabinet to “immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

This would be the first time that such a step has been taken, but it is needed and it is needed now.

Great complications would doubtless follow, as the amendment allows further pushback from Trump if, as expected, he would seek to hold on to power.

As I wrote when I covered the history of this amendment at BuzzFeed News back during Trump’s first administration:

The fourth section — never used in the 50 years since it was adopted — gives the vice president and cabinet the power to declare that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It is heavily weighted in favor of the president’s ability to serve, enabling the president to force a congressional vote on the issue — a vote that would take two-thirds of both houses of Congress to keep the president out of power. In short, it’s a complicated and rigorous process that would require many elected and appointed officials to agree the president was unfit.

As such, Vance, the cabinet, and Congress must be ready, and must react accordingly — taking the only step that their oaths of office would faithfully allow. If impeachment — which requires only a majority vote of the House — needs to follow this initial, immediate step, then Congress must follow in lock step.

The presidency of Donald Trump — and the horrifying likelihood of what is to come if he is allowed to remain in office — must be stopped.

Now.

Any federal official who does not respond to Tuesday’s threat in a manner befitting their own constitutional obligations in light of Trump’s past actions will bear a part of the responsibility for what follows.

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How we got here and what needs to happen

Donald Trump should have been impeached and removed from office on January 6, 2021, or in the days the followed. That would have stopped all of this.

In the absence of that, he should have been impeached and convicted once he left office, again, preventing all of this.

Had that failed, the Department of Justice in the Biden administration should have acted more quickly to prosecute Trump for his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election — one of the most fundamental domestic failings a president could engage in. His conviction likely would have stopped this.

The Supreme Court should have, quite simply, gotten the case over the Insurrection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment right, and Trump’s removal from the ballot should have been allowed.

The Supreme Court should have resolved the immunity case in a way that reflected what lower courts and most scholars believed: Trump, as a former president, could have — and should have — faced accountability for his lawless actions.

But, none of that turned out that way, and a majority voted for Trump in 2024.

An overwhelming majority, however, now disapproves of the way Trump is abusing his office.

The people understand that what Trump is doing is wrong. This is not only shown in polls. It also has been shown in special elections across the country, and it has been shown in the streets — as millions upon millions have gone out to protest this man who abuses this office for his own gain, often seemingly only out of vengeance, or even simply because he believes he can.

His domestic abuses of the nation and its people have included efforts to turn troops on the American public and his extremist immigration enforcement policies have led to the killings of Americans and others in our nation. His administration’s demeaning of Congress by ignoring the laws, including appropriations, that it had passed and the growing number of violated court orders show an abuse of the balance of powers. His global lawlessness — from boat-strike murders to kidnapping presidents to threatening to destroy a “whole civilization” — is without justification, continual, and getting worse by the day.

Trump may believe that he set a red line on Tuesday morning, but the red line is one that was set for those officials who can — and must — stop this.

Invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment now, for it could not be more clear that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”