Trump Election Tantrum Sparks 25th Amendment Demand

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1:03Michael Popok:Yeah, it's time to talk about the 25th Amendment again and Donald Trump being incapacitated, unable to perform his job because of his erratic, dysfunctional behavior. There's a medical term for what we're observing with Donald Trump. He's bonkers. Just look at Iran. You can set aside the Epstein scandal, although I really don't want to. You can set aside his destruction of the American economy. You can set aside his lawlessness, his rogue unconstitutional violations. You can set all that aside for a minute. All you got to look is the Iranian war and how he's conducting it to see that the commander in chief needs to be relieved of his duties.

1:42Michael Popok:I feel like I'm watching the Cain mutiny and I'm waiting for somebody to tap Humphrey Bogart on the shoulder and take him out of his command position. That would be the majority of the cabinet. As Donald Trump does two things, I'll just use two examples for this hot take. His continued flirtation with constitutional disaster and demanding that he get a third term or some part of a third term beyond 2028 and stay in office. The fact that he either believes that or doesn't really believe that. And I'll show you video clips indicating both. But the fact that he keeps talking about it to try to make himself not lame duck at the midterms demonstrates that, you know, the executive function is checked out.

2:25Michael Popok:And the fact that his supporters believe it as well is also an indication that he is disabled and should be removed from office under the 25th Amendment. Then just look at what he's doing in Iran. I mean, every other hour, it's another erratic decision with no planning and no forethought by Donald Trump. I mean, we'll go over it here on this hot take, but just in the last 24 hours. First, he said, I'm going to start bombing, meaning I'm going to start committing war crimes by bombing civilian electrical plants. That's a war crime. And he said it in a social media post. I'm going to start bombing in 48 hours unless unless there's an immediate unblockading of the Strait of Hormuz through which 27 percent of the world's gas and oil flows by Iran.

3:14And then 24 hours later or less in a typo written second posting on social media.

3:22Michael Popok:That's what I love. I love a government, a superpower being run by social media postings. he then says again replete with with typos that he's had some constructive conversations or somebody has with the iranians and therefore he's not going to be doing the war crimes that he threatened oh i feel much better now 25th amendment anybody let's go over the 22nd versus the 25th amendment here on the minus touch network and on legal af i am michael popock all right 22nd amendment says that nobody can be elected to the presidency more than twice. Came out after FDR, got four terms. He died in his fourth term.

4:01Michael Popok:And Republicans weren't happy about that. So let's be frank. So they posted a, they got a constitutional amendment passed for two terms only for a president. Okay. Elected. Now that's the tricky little word of the 22nd amendment. They are going to allow somebody to serve an additional two years if he also or she also, let's say, took over from the vice president position. Let's say a president died, they get two years, and then they get two more terms. But if like president gets elected like McKinley and dies 34 days into office and the vice president takes over for the remainder almost four years, that president's not going to be able to do two more elected terms because there's a cap of a total of 10 years in the 22nd Amendment.

4:52Michael Popok:So I've heard all of these speculations by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's consultant and coup plotter during January 2020, that maybe J.D. Vance, it'll be like a stalking horse, like a Trojan horse. J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio will run. They'll go through the effort to becoming president, Donald Trump will be their vice president. And then they'll suddenly like on day one, turn it over to President Trump. Ha ha. That doesn't work. It could work for two years. But I think there'd be a lot of constitutional challenges to that gaming of the system under the Constitution if somebody were to do that. And I got news for Donald Trump.

5:33Michael Popok:I don't think J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio or anybody else is going to go through the time, money and effort and stress of running for presidency just to turn it over to Donald Trump. And if that was a conspiracy to do that in advance, I think there'd be something about the Supreme Court, some things the Supreme Court would have to weigh in on related to that, if you know what I mean. Okay, yet that hasn't stopped Donald Trump in the last 24 to 48 hours to continue to talk about getting a third term. Here's a posting that he did related to that, where, you know, some trolling group called Women for Trump or whatever.

6:16Michael Popok:It must be a very small group. Posted third term to compensate Trump for a stolen election. I mean, who is really out there that thinks that Joe Biden stole an election? How? With what? There was no voter fraud that was outcome determinative. There was no Venezuelan software that was flipping votes from Trump to Biden. Trump lost, OK? It may have been aberrational because it was 2020 and it was coming off of COVID and Joe Biden campaigned from a bunker in his house, but he won, OK? Okay? Plain and simple. Probably had to do with people not being happy with Donald Trump after Jan 6th and leading an insurrection.

7:02Michael Popok:And yet there's these numb nuts out there that talk about Trump won and he should be given a third term to compensate for the fact that he won. No, that's not how the 22nd Amendment runs. At best, he could run as vice president. And if somewhere along the way, he could serve two more years and that's it. Now we turn to the erratic behavior and the 25th Amendment. Let's just use Iran for a minute. Again, I'm putting aside his role in a child sex trafficking, two sex traffickers, one indicted, convicted, the other one indicted and died. And his role in that and use of the Department of Justice and FBI to cover it up.

7:45Michael Popok:Let's set that aside. Let's set aside wrecking the economy, which he's done. Let's set aside all of the erratic behavior in attacking our allies and trying to side with Russia over America's interests. Let's set all that aside. Let's just focus on the conduct of the Iranian war. OK. No planning. No planning other than any chimpanzee can fire. Sorry, military can fire a weapon. OK, if trained properly. Enough bananas. You can get them to do anything. That's easy. The hard part is then what do you do about the 90 million people of a country in Iran and who's going to lead it? Then he said he's going to be responsible for regime change.

8:26Michael Popok:Then he said he's going to pick the regime change leader. Then he said, I'm not going to change a regime change as people in his administration tried to dial back goals and said we're just trying to take out the Navy and missiles. Then he said we have to, oh wait, the Strait of Hormuz where 27 % of American oil went through, that's being blockaded? Oh, I didn't really think about that. I'll start bombing around it. Will that work? No. Well, then magical thinking. It'll just unblockade itself, he said at one point. Yeah, that didn't work. And then I'll get my allies, who I've been bashing for 15, 16 months, to come to our aid and join the war.

9:00Michael Popok:How's that? No, that didn't work. Okay. I'll start bombing civilian electrical plants, power plants, which is a war crime, and I'll threaten that in a social media post. Oh, that didn't work. Oh, wait a minute. will escalate to de-escalate, which is what his Treasury Secretary said over the weekend. And then the backdrop of all of this is that there is no ground game because we cannot win a ground war against Iran. A, we don't have the proper training or troops. The troops do not want to do this Iranian war. You know, many of them believe, based on polling, that this is being led, foreign policy being led by Israel.

9:41Michael Popok:And they don't see this as their war. or America First War. So you don't have the esprit de corps and the conviction of your troops. You don't have the ability to send in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of troops into Iran to beat its forces. So you got to do it from the air, but you can't beat Iran with a bombing run because of their culture, because of their religion, because they see this as generational. This war will be over when Iran says it's over, not when Donald Trump declares it over. And they don't want it over until Trump is out of the Middle East, until they control the Strait of Hormuz forever and make it a toll plaza for them to earn money.

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12:10Michael Popok:The son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with no diplomatic, technical, or war experience? Or maybe Steve Witkoff, the golf buddy cryptocurrency mogul? who's the other special envoy for the region, also has no experience. Is that where you're getting your intel from? This makes you wholly unqualified, incapable to serve the American people as commander in chief, as president, which brings us to the 25th Amendment. I set this up as 20, it's like a boxing match. In this corner of the 22nd Amendment, in this corner of the 25th Amendment. 25th Amendment, I'll give you, is that, and Clause 4 says that if a president, this is the involuntary removal of a president.

12:55Michael Popok:I'll summarize it this way. If a majority of the president's cabinet think he's gone bonkers, and with the support of the vice president, they then can take him out of office subject to a vote in the House and the Senate. Okay? Let's unpack that. First, you need a majority of the cabinet picked by Donald Trump. So you've got about 12 cabinet members-ish. You need about seven to jump off sides and say, hmm, I didn't sign up for this. I don't want to be impeached for war crimes or obstruction or any other crime. It's time to have a conversation. Now, let me speak to the cabinet for a minute. I know a couple of them.

13:38Michael Popok:It's time to meet separately. about a possibility that the person that you report to has gone nuts. If people were wondering, I wonder what it would look like if a president went mad during office. Okay, we're watching it. We're watching it. The erratic behavior, the demented behavior, the attacks and wasting of billions, if not trillions of taxpayer dollars on his perceived political targets and enemies, his distraction from things that matter to the American people, his destruction or attempted destruction or chloroforming of the American economy. That's what it looks like. The scandal written, lurching from one constitutional crisis or one scandal of immorality to the next.

14:28Michael Popok:Meet separately. Have a conversation. Do a straw poll. See if you have seven votes. Okay. Now, J.D. Vance, if you really want to be president of the United States one day, And that's not something I take lightly, nor do I want you to accomplish that. You will never do it on the coattails of Donald Trump being seen as his chief enabler. If you step out of the shadows and take a moment and become a true patriot and take out Donald Trump, there will at least begrudgingly be hundreds of millions of people that may reward you for your confidence and for your courage. I'm just saying, because under the way the 25th Amendment works, we need the vice president to support this.

15:10Michael Popok:Majority plus vice president takes the president out of office. President then has four days to tell Congress whether he agrees. We know he's not going to agree. So he will oppose, which means that two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate will have to agree with the majority of the cabinet to sideline the presidency. Now, we're not going to get the two-thirds House and Senate now. That's where the midterms come in. That's why the midterms are that wild card. At the midterms, I see a world where the Democrats could get two-thirds of the House. 435 seats, you need two-thirds. We can get that.

15:53I mean, there's predictions now based on just raw data input that out of the 435,

16:03Michael Popok:I mean, could we get 287? I think we get 250, 260. Could we get another 27 what's left of the Republican carcass to come over and support it? Maybe. Now, the hardest part is the Senate, because for the Senate, you're going to need 67 votes in the Senate. On a good day, I think the Democrats get 57, 58 Senate seats, which means we're going to need another eight or nine Republicans to come over and support that as well. But if the case is made, you know, think about this. Think about if a majority of his cabinet plus the vice president supported it. You might see Republicans coming over to the Democrat side because it'll be seen as a bipartisan issue.

16:45Because if they have gone that step, that nuclear step of triggering the 25th Amendment,

16:51Michael Popok:some bad shit that they've seen that we haven't has happened. So I think it could happen. Starts with the midterms again. How many times do we talk about in hot takes the need to vote, register to vote, register your friends and family to vote and vote on midterm? Starts with the House and the Senate. to give some confidence and run interference for the cabinet and call for the 25th Amendment and have it heard loud and clear. And the more Donald Trump talks about that he's going to stay for a third term, that's the other factor that goes into he is unable to perform his job that he continues to talk about being a constitutional criminal.

17:39Michael Popok:Here's a clip of Donald Trump musing about staying in for a third term. Play it.

18:08Because Biden was so bad, he did such a bad job. And I think that's one of the reasons that I'm popular, if you want to know the truth. I think I'm popular because we've done a great job. I think we've had the best almost 100 days of any president. And most people are saying that. And it's an honor. We're bringing back our country. We're respected as a country again. And we're strongly respected. And people are amazed. I was with some very important people today, and they said that they've never seen a turnaround of a country as fast as this. Even look at our border. We have nobody coming in. And you can come into our country, but you have to come in legally.

18:50But we have nobody coming in to our country. It's almost shut down. They've never seen anything like this. The Constitution limits a president to two terms. Is it your understanding that they have to be? Well, I don't even want to talk about it. I'm just telling you, I have had more people say, please run again. They said, we have a long way to go before we even think about that.

19:12Michael Popok:But I've had a lot of people. And yet recently, with a shy little smile, a sly little smile like the Cheshire Cat, he said, no, I've been told I can't stay in. Play that clip. Everyone's 401k is eating records. So we have the greatest economy we've ever had. I have my highest poll numbers that I've ever had. And you know, based on what I read, I guess I'm not allowed to run. So we'll see what happens. Johnson says you're trolling when you talk about a third term. I don't think he said that. I don't think he'd use that term. But it's a very interesting thing. I have the best numbers for any president in many years.

19:51Any president. And I would say that if you read it, it's pretty clear I'm not allowed to run. It's too bad. I missed it.

19:59Michael Popok:But we have a lot of great people. So which is it? What he's doing is he's trolling America to try to remain relevant as it looks like he's going to get wiped out at the midterms. But it's also another him flirting with this issue is yet another grounds to take him out of the 25th Amendment and force the issue with the cabinet and with the and with the with the vice president. Maybe it'll take impeachment proceedings to be started, which is a lot easier because you only need 218 votes to impeach. And then you need a majority in the Senate as well, or two-thirds in the Senate as well to convict.

20:40But let's get the impeachment going of some of these cabinet members.

20:45Michael Popok:That may bring them round, if you know what I mean. I'm glad you're here on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF. Take a minute, hit the free subscribe button on both channels, Legal AF and Midas Touch. Till my next report, this is Michael. Can't get your fill of Legal AF? Me neither. That's why we formed the Legal AF Substack. Every time we mention something in a hot take, whether it's a court filing or a oral argument, come over to the Substack. You'll find the court filing and the oral argument there, including a daily roundup that I do call, wait for it, Morning AF. What else? All the other contributors from Legal AF are there as well.

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