The US constitution should make it possible to remove a president who’s not fit for office. But we’re going to need another way out, writes Arwa Mahdawi
For the past few months, I have been waging a cold war with a neighbour who constantly puts out their rubbish on the wrong day. And by “cold war” I mean complaining incessantly to my longsuffering wife while the neighbour goes about their business blissfully unaware that we are mortal enemies. But enough is enough. Last week I decided to end this situation via a strongly worded letter. “Tuesday will be Explosions Day in your house, neighbour!” I wrote. “There will be nothing like it!!! Put out your Fuckin’ Rubbish properly, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
I am sorry to drag Allah into this obviously imaginary exchange, but I’m just channelling the US president. I’m sure you’ve already seen Donald Trump’s profanity-laden Easter Sunday warning to Iran, where he threatened to carry out the mass bombing of civilian infrastructure – but if you haven’t, then go read it and weep. The days where Trump’s outbursts were amusing (remember “covfefe”?) are long gone. There is nothing funny about endless stream-of-consciousness screeds from a man who is not just destroying the US, but dragging the whole world down with it. If a civilian acted like the president routinely does, they’d find themselves fired very quickly.
Many people are asking what exactly it would take to get Trump fired from the most powerful job in the US. Various politicians have called for the 25th amendment to be invoked, which is one route for getting rid of an unfit president. Following Trump’s “crazy bastards” social media post, Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X: “If I were in Trump’s cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”
Let’s be honest: at this rate Trump could wipe out half of the Middle East and I’m not sure anyone in his orbit would lift a finger to try to get him removed. Hell, they’d probably be cheering on the slaughter and crying happy tears at the idea that the end times are nigh. Even if they weren’t all drinking the Trump Kool-Aid, the US system makes it incredibly difficult to remove a president. Ultimately, there are only two ways Trump is leaving office before the end of his term. The first is in a casket. The second is if his shenanigans end up losing his billionaire pals money. Which seems unlikely, considering all the well-timed stock market trades that seem to be going on amid the Iran war.
Anyway, I hope all the new graduates navigating a grim job market are paying attention to this. If you want a career path that allows unparalleled job stability, no matter how you badly you behave, US politics is the way to go. It’s not just difficult to get rid of a president; the system makes it almost impossible to beat an incumbent congressperson or senator. Which means that once someone gets into power, they often stay in power for far longer than is good for anyone. In 2024, for example, a reporter discovered that a Republican congresswoman from Texas, who hadn’t cast a vote for months, was in an assisted living facility dealing with “dementia issues”. The late Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, meanwhile, died in office in 2023, at the age of 90. By the end she had serious health issues that caused her to miss nearly 100 votes, and questions were swirling about her mental acuity. Republican senator Mitch McConnell, 84, has suffered a number of strange “freezing” incidents in public but has decided to leave with his dignity somewhat intact and retire this year. And I obviously don’t need to tell you about Joe Biden.
But look, enough hand-wringing. I think I have a way out of this mess. Since we can’t rely on the usual checks and balances to get Trump out of office, we have to get creative. The Trump administration loves technology; why not convince the dear leader he can make history by spending his days golfing while his work is done by the world’s first AI president? Sure, AI is problematic, but if we’re going from zero intelligence to artificial intelligence, that’s an upgrade, right? And if AI-Trump starts acting up, we can always try turning it off and then turning it on again. Shame you can’t do that for democracy.
Trump received five deferments during the height of the Vietnam War. Four were for education. The fifth was the 1-Y medical deferment in October 1968, primarily for bone spurs in his heels
In the U.S., footage of American troops rolling out a red carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska sparks widespread criticism and debate on social media
Famous American blogger Jake Broe called the gesture a humiliation for the U.S.
“Trump literally had uniformed active duty soldiers on their hands and knees rolling out the red carpet for a genocidal dictator who has killed millions of people around the world the last 26 years. America has fallen,” he emphasized.
Commentators, meanwhile, were divided: some believe there is nothing humiliating about this and that it is standard diplomatic protocol, while others argue that the U.S. disgraced itself by allowing its soldiers to honor a dictator.
Meaghan Mobbs, daughter of Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, who now lives in Kyiv, also joined the discussion.
“Uniformed American soldiers should not have been used to lay out a red carpet for one of our main adversaries. Full stop. Horrible decision and there should be consequences for whomever made it,” she emphasized.
Most commentators said they agreed with her, though some criticized her.
In response to her post, one user wrote, “This is called respect. Incredible that a general’s daughter doesn’t understand this concept.” Megan replied, “I am the daughter of an American general, and we do not kneel before tyrants.”
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Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska: what we know
On the night of August 16, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a “3-on-3” summit in Anchorage, Alaska, lasting nearly three hours — their longest conversation to date. According to the U.S. leader, the meeting was “productive,” and they discussed many issues, but “they did not fully agree on everything,” so “no deal has been reached yet.”
The U.S. president said he will soon hold calls with NATO representatives, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and others.
Trump also stated that the Alaska summit nearly produced an agreement, and a meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin with his participation is now planned.
“Now it’s in Zelenskyy’s hands — whether he can reach an agreement. A meeting between Zelenskyy, Putin, and myself will be organized,” Trump said.
On the morning of August 16, Trump spoke by phone with his Ukrainian counterpart Zelenskyy, with several European leaders participating. During the call, Zelenskyy accepted Trump’s invitation to visit Washington this Monday, August 18.
Trump stated that after talks with Putin in Alaska and discussions with Zelenskyy and EU leaders, the parties concluded that the best way to end the war is to immediately sign a peace agreement, without a temporary ceasefire.
The leaders of Germany, France, Poland, Italy, and the United Kingdom, together with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued a joint statement following Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
Early yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent three U.S. citizens aged 2, 4, and 7 from Louisiana, including one with Stage 4 cancer, to Honduras when they deported their mothers. The three are children of two different mothers who were arrested while checking in with the government as part of their routine process for immigration proceedings. The women and their children were not permitted to speak to family or lawyers before being flown to Honduras. The cancer patient was sent out of the country without medication or consultation with doctors although, according to Charisma Madarang and Lorena O’Neil of Rolling Stone, ICE agents were told of the child’s medical needs.
The government says the mothers opted to take their U.S. citizen children to Honduras with them. But as Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post noted, because ICE refused to let the women talk to their lawyers, there is only the agents’ word for how events transpired.
ICE also deported Heidy Sánchez, a Cuban-born mother of a one-year-old who is still breastfeeding, leaving the U.S.-born child in the U.S. with her father, who is a U.S. citizen. Like the women flown to Honduras, Sánchez was detained when she showed up at a scheduled check-in with ICE.
In March, ICE agents sent four U.S. citizens, including a 10-year-old with brain cancer, to Mexico when they deported their undocumented parents.
In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” He promises to make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”
Reelected in 2024, on his first day in office, Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It announced a new U.S. policy, saying that the government would not issue documents recognizing U.S. citizenship to persons whose “mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or…when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
The order specified that it would not take effect for 30 days. If it had been in effect when Trump’s rival for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, was born, she would have fallen under it.
But an executive order is simply a directive to federal employees. It cannot override the Constitution. Trump’s attack on the idea of birthright citizenship as a “historical myth” is a perversion of our history.
In the nineteenth century, the United States enshrined in its fundamental law the idea that there would not be different levels of rights in this country. Although not honored in practice, that idea, and its place in the law, gave those excluded from it the language and the tools to fight for equality. Over time, Americans have increasingly expanded those included in it.
The Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
After the Civil War, in 1866, as former Confederates denied their Black neighbors basic rights, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”
But President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. He objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when 11 southern states were not represented in Congress.
When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.
But the question of whether the amendment really did recognize the citizenship of the U.S.-born children of immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where prejudice against Chinese immigrants ran hot. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act declaring that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But what about their children who were born in the United States?
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
That decision has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people.
On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
