US cabinet mulls invoking 25th amendment to sack Trump: Media

Invoking it would require Vice President Michael Pence to lead the cabinet in a vote on removing him.

The world watched with dismay American institutions shaken to the core by an angry mob even as US media said the members of US President Donald Trump’s cabinet on Wednesday discussed the possibility of removing Trump from office.

The discussions focused on the 25th amendment to the US Constitution, which allows for a president’s removal by the vice president and cabinet if he is judged “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” three US news channels reported

Invoking it would require Vice President Michael Pence to lead the cabinet in a vote on removing him.

CNN quoted unnamed Republican leaders saying the 25th amendment had been discussed, saying they had described Trump as “out of control.”

ABC reporter Katherine Faulders said “multiple” sources had told her that discussions took place on the unprecedented move.

Trump’s encouragement of the protesters, his unfounded claims that he lost the November 3 presidential election due to massive fraud, and other bizarre behaviour have raised questions about his ability to lead.

While only two weeks remain before President-elect Joe Biden takes office, after the attacks on Congress Wednesday Democratic lawmakers called for invoking the 25th Amendment as well.

Democrats of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Pence urging him to act to remove Trump, saying he had stoked an act of insurrection and “sought to undermine our democracy.”

“The President incited a domestic terror attack on the Capitol. He is an imminent threat to our democracy and he needs to be removed from office immediately,” said Representative Kathleen Rice in a tweet. “The Cabinet must invoke the 25th Amendment,” she wrote.

The world was aghast at what has happened. “If it can happen in the US, it can happen anywhere,” said Gunjan Chhibber, a 39-year-old who works for an American tech company in India, the world’s largest democracy. She stayed up all night, watching and worrying at her home in Delhi as the chaos unfolded many time zones away.

Eva Sakschewska, a German who followed the news closely, said the events in Washington were almost inconceivable.

“You can only fear how far this can go when populists come to power and do such things,” she said. “You know that in the US, democracy has a long history and that it comes to something like that — yes one is afraid.”

Venezuela, which is under US sanctions, said the events showed that the U.S. “is suffering what it has generated in other countries with its politics of aggression.”

“We exported so much democracy that we don’t have any left,” American-Palestinian scholar Yousef Monayyer wrote on Twitter, the social network favoured by Trump until he was locked out of it late Wednesday.

His comment joined the growing strain of sarcasm bordering on schadenfreude from those who have long resented the perceived American tendency to chastise other countries for less-than-perfect adherence to democratic ideals.

This time, however, it was an attempt by Americans to stop a peaceful transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden after a democratic election in a country that many around the world have looked at as a model for democratic governance.

In China, which has had constant friction with Washington over trade, as well as military and political issues, people were scathing in their criticism of Trump and his supporters, citing both the coronavirus pandemic and the mob action.