Donald Trump’s 25th Amendment math takes surreal turn
Donald Trump threatened to fire yet another cabinet member yesterday, this time Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Good riddance, except Trump will surely replace him with someone even worse. This comes after Trump pushed out respected Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and replaced them with his own corrupt lackeys on an “acting” basis. Come to think of it, that may be the point.
Let’s be realistic here: Donald Trump is a brute force kind of guy. When he does get ahead, it’s usually with insults, threats, bribery, blackmail, and grifting. He’s not a sophisticated strategist. And he’s so lazy when it comes to learning the laws and the Constitution, months after he’d taken office, he allegedly didn’t know he could be ousted under the 25th Amendment. But some of Trump’s moves are more strategic than that, and it brings us to the rapidly shifting 25th Amendment math.
In the past several weeks Donald Trump has pushed out one guy (Mattis) who all but definitely would have voted for his ouster, one guy (Sessions) who might have done it out of spite, and now he’s targeting a guy (Mnuchin) who would probably do whatever the conservative billionaires tell him to do. He’s installed two comically unqualified loyalists, Matt Whitaker and Patrick Shanahan, as “acting” cabinet members. This means they didn’t have to go through Senate confirmation. They also just happen to be people who would definitely vote against his ouster.
Even if Donald Trump is trying to rapidly swap out his cabinet in the hope of avoiding being removed via the 25th Amendment, his plan still has shortcomings. Because such an ouster has never been tried, it’s not even clear if “acting” cabinet members would be allowed to vote. But even by simply taking a few votes off the table, Trump would be shifting the math in his favor.
We’ve reached the surreal point where the majority of Americans now feel that Donald Trump needs to be urgently ousted, and he keeps changing how the math would play out in an ouster vote. This may be mere coincidence; in the late stages of any failing regime, top underlings are often ousted simply because someone needs to be that week’s scapegoat. But is it possible that someone smarter than Trump has been whispering in his ear about reducing the cabinet headcount before a 25th Amendment vote can take place? We’ll see.
