Are any Republicans getting ready to move against Trump?

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0:32This is a Global Player original podcast. If you're on the way out, set fire to it as you go.

0:37Miles Taylor:I'll reveal to you guys today, I've been in text message conversations with some of these Republican members of Congress. We haven't seen a lot of backbone from your old party. It's ultimately the people themselves who made this almost suicidal civic choice to restore this man to office, and it's the people themselves that can reverse it. Donald Trump and the Pope have started something of a few. You are a prominent Catholic American politician. Yes. The president said that the Pope is too liberal. He said he's terrible for foreign policy. And he posted an image today, the president did, of an AI-generated image, apparently, with him looking like Jesus.

1:15The Pope has been speaking out against the war. He says, I'm not afraid of the Trump administration. What is going on? You'd have to ask a psychiatrist. That's Nancy Pelosi, for a long time the Democrats Speaker of the House. Many in her party now are questioning whether it would be possible for them to remove Trump from office, invoking what they call Amendment 25. The bigger question, though, is would anyone inside his cabinet, would anyone inside the House and the Senate do the same? The chances seem slim. Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel.

2:05It's John. It's Maitlis. And for those of you who haven't studied every single amendment in the US Constitution, the 25th Amendment is sort of like the nuclear button, or at least Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is the nuclear button, because what it enables is the Cabinet to say, right we think the president has lost his marbles we think he should be removed and the vice president should take over and that then gets sent to the house of representatives and the senate and if they then vote by a two-thirds majority so it'd require huge numbers of republicans uh to be involved in this then you can remove the president from office has it ever happened no nowhere near but people are starting to talk about it and not just kind of opposition voices who've always hated Donald Trump there are people within America saying now given what Donald Trump has tweeted out and you know threatening to erase civilizations in a night and all the rest of it people are starting to ask that question a little bit louder than ever before yeah I mean House Democrats are right now calling for commission which would have to be led by J.D.

3:17Vance that's the first stumbling block, I think, to oust Trump under this amendment. And it is if they can determine that he is no longer fit to serve. Now, you know, at this point, I always invoke the film Dave. This is when, you know, the sort of fictional president is undergoing heart surgery or goes into a coma and they have to get a sort of body double to serve. This has actually happened before. You know, when somebody has been... Section three of the 20th. Section three, when you've been through an illness or an operation, technically, the president is temporarily removed from his post and it is filled in by...

3:52If you're under general anaesthetic. Exactly. But this is a different level that they're calling for. And this comes from Jamie Raskin, who's a friend of the podcast, you've heard him on here before. He is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. And it was basically as a consequence of some of those bizarre statements from Trump in the last week, including that the threat to Iran's whole civilisation and the social media depiction of him as Christ last week, which led, I think, around 50 signatories to this motion, essentially, to try and get him removed. Now, as you say, it's never happened before.

4:32And the question that we always have at this point is, are Democrats just speaking to themselves? Are they just screaming into the wind because they feel they've got to do something? The midterm elections aren't for another six months. It's a long time to wait when you've got a guy who's got his finger over the nuclear button you know is there any chance in hell that they will be joined by the party opposite them you know the republican party in in in an actual move in an action that could really precipitate this happening and i mean the feeling is no right yeah no you know in british politics you're a backbench mp you You don't have a lot of power, but you can put down what's called an early day motion, which is like a glorified press release.

5:16You know, MP4X calls on the government to do Y. It doesn't go anywhere. They never become law, but it gets you some publicity in your own local area. I think there is an element of that in these 50 Democrat members of Congress signing this. Of course, you know, it's getting attention because there are 50 of them and this is a big number. And normally you don't get that being levelled against the serving president. I think that's the wrong question. Will that happen? I think what the right question is, is it significant that you are seeing quite a number of voices that are moving against him? Look, Donald Trump, we know, picked a cabinet who would be obsequious and fawning and deferential and do whatever they are asked.

6:02There is no chance a majority of them are going to sign a letter to send to Congress saying he is unfit for office. We need to move against him. I cannot imagine what he would need to do to make that happen. But the fact is, there are those in MAGA land who are talking up against him, you know, Tucker Carlson and others, Megyn Kelly who are significant voices in the MAGA coalition who are starting to question whether Donald Trump has completely lost it and the fact that that coupled with the 50 congress men and women in the house who are raising this as a question I think it's significant in and of itself not whether Donald Trump is about to be removed from office.

6:48And if you leave I guess Amendment 25 to one side, what is also becoming clear is there are smaller but mathematical ways in which you can start to reduce Trump's power in Congress. You can start to reduce the power of the Speaker, Mike Johnson, who is joined at the hip with Trump. And in this episode, you're going to hear from Miles Taylor. He worked in Trump's first administration, the Department for Homeland Security. He actually became a whistleblower, telling the world, initially anonymously what was going on in government and why it frightened him so much. And Miles Taylor tells us about conversations that he is currently having with Republicans who are right now contemplating whether to move against their own president.

7:36We're joined now by Miles Taylor, who was a former national security official at the Department of Homeland Security during Donald Trump's first term. And you've recently written an article about whether Donald Trump today is still fit to serve as president. Now, you've been a longstanding critic of his. That should be taken as read at the outset. But what should people look for that is different between Donald Trump then and Donald Trump now?

8:08Miles Taylor:Well, it's right that I'm a longstanding critic, but I had hoped for the president to be a different person. I mean, I'm a lifelong conservative. When I went into the first Trump administration, I hoped like other presidents, the office would sober him. And, you know, whether it was Barack Obama or George W. Bush, they've all said that becoming president had this sort of humbling effect on them. Now, I wasn't under any illusions that that would happen instantly with Donald Trump. But the man I first encountered in the Oval Office seemed by no means humbled. In fact, he was as impulsive and impetuous in private as he seemed in public on the campaign trail when he was first running, but it was even worse.

8:52Miles Taylor:Why? Because on the campaign trail, there's almost no consequence to your words. Sure, you can say something that offends people, but your words don't have life or death consequences. When you are president of the United States, you have teams every day that come into your office that talk to you about things like terrorist attacks and cyber attacks and the deployment of U.S. troops abroad, decisions that have real life and death consequences. And in those moments, over the two and a half years I was in the first Trump administration, I encountered a man who was indifferent to the consequences of his decisions unless those consequences affected him personally.

9:31Miles Taylor:And I don't mean that in any sort of hyperbolic way. We would go in with life or death issues, an impending hurricane, troops that were like sitting ducks in Syria. And the president had a very distracted and sort of reckless approach to that decision making. Now, here's what happened in the first term. There was a lot of folks around Donald Trump who had a respect for the rule of law, who had worked in previous Republican administrations and were comfortable speaking truth to power and making sure that the president didn't make decisions that got people killed or got him or his own aides sent to prison.

10:12Miles Taylor:The difference is now in a second term, they have assiduously screened out people who are willing to say no to the president. That was a declared objective is to make sure they didn't come back in with folks who were challenging the president. And the result is we're all seeing the real Donald Trump that those of us on his team used to see behind the scenes in the first term. But is it more exaggerated now? I mean, you look at his Easter Saturday post where he's effing and this and, you know, we're going to kill the bastards, they're crazy bastards or whatever. Then you had the kind of post about civilization, a civilization will die tonight and nothing is going to bring them back.

10:48And then he's putting up kind of AI generated pictures of himself seemingly as Christ.

10:55Miles Taylor:I mean, look, I think the man himself is more unstable than he was in the first term. I mean, look, let's all just be logical about it. None of us need to be doctors. None of us need to be experts to see. It's been a decade since we first met the man in politics. He's, you know, crossing the threshold of 80 years old in June. He's aging. It shows he's becoming more unhinged than he was before. I bristle at the suggestion that we can't reach those conclusions unless we're medical doctors. Give me a break. Every single one of us is the progeny of someone who has aged. And we have watched people age in our lives.

11:37Miles Taylor:We've put some of them in nursing homes. We're seeing this happen with the president of the United States because it's nature. But not everyone we watch age. has the nuclear button under the pointer of their finger. This man does, and it should concern us. And his attitude is unbecoming of a friend or a family member. And it's very unbecoming for the leader of the free world and happens to have extraordinary repercussions. And so those mocking images of Jesus Christ or him as Jesus Christ aren't just a bad joke. There is something that offends tens of millions of people in this country, but also incidentally happens to cause him sort of political self-destruction.

12:23But, Miles, isn't the reality of this that although there is kind of theoretically the 25th Amendment, which by which he could be removed from office, the reality is that his cabinet is not going to move against him. And you're not going to get two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate to vote him out of office. Yeah.

12:41Miles Taylor:Well, I mean, look, here's a couple of things I think we have to address first. Donald Trump creates a lot of noise. The memes are a distraction and they're a very big distraction. But the words that he issues, the decisions he makes are the destruction. And when Donald Trump makes genocidal threats against an entire population, we have to take it very seriously, which is what he did the other week when he threatened that an entire civilization will die tonight was his quote about Iran. That in and of itself can be argued to be a war crime, can be argued to be in violation of the Geneva Conventions that the United States helped put in place.

13:24Miles Taylor:That's really serious. That's as serious as it gets when you're thinking about things like the 25th Amendment, which was designed as a mechanism, not just to give the president reprieve if he had to go have surgery and have someone stand in. It was designed as an emergency mechanism where a president disabled or a president became unfit for office, became psychologically deranged. These are the types of circumstances we need to consider that. If Donald Trump, let's just really think about this. If Donald Trump had dropped a nuclear weapon on the Iranians to slaughter a population, would that not have been a moment for his cabinet to stand up and do something?

14:05Miles Taylor:My fear, of course, is they may not have because of what I said earlier. They assiduously screened to make sure the people in this cabinet would be unflinchingly loyal. And you've seen them embrace policies that federal judges, including federal judges appointed by Donald Trump, have said are illegal and unconstitutional. And yet they'll still stand by those policies. And so I do worry about whether his cabinet would undertake those actions. And just to draw a contrast to the first administration, that was the first thing I disclosed when I came forward from the Trump administration is that his cabinet was talking about the 25th Amendment in the first term.

14:49Miles Taylor:And these weren't people conspiring against him. They weren't some secret cabal that came in to undermine Trump. Most of those cabinet secretaries didn't know each other until they got confirmed into Donald Trump's first cabinet. But once they did, and once they met the man who were now seen much more clearly on the world stage, they decided, you know what, this could go very, very badly. And if he makes a catastrophic decision that could result in the death of innocent people, we've got to be prepared to invoke these emergency powers to get him to step down. Now, of course, that never happened in the first term.

15:24Miles Taylor:But even that conversation, I can guarantee you, is not happening among his staff, which is why the discussion has been punted over to the United States Congress. I do think you've taken us to a really key point here, Miles. I mean, you are the sort of Tiresias figure in a way. You've been saying this for a decade now, right? This is a three-step sort of project. The first is to recognise it. The second is to call it out. And the third is to action it. And it seems to me, and we see this constantly, there are a lot of people who are now recognising what you recognise, saying what you say, but there's a big gulf between getting from two to three, right?

16:08So I guess the question is, If this democratic movement to sign the 25th Amendment will probably go nowhere, if the last two attempts to impeach him ultimately went nowhere, is there something that the opposition, whether that is Republicans or Democrats, opposition to Trump, should be doing better that they're not doing?

16:32Miles Taylor:Well, I mean, look, I would say very frankly, if Donald Trump is a what I would call a weapon of mass distraction, if he's a human WMD, I have the answer for how to disarm that WMD. I can tell people very clearly. I know where the codes are stored. I can tell you the process. I can tell you how to push the button. And this is what I would say to the American people. You look up your polling place, you find out who Donald Trump has supported around the country and who has stood by illegal decisions and the recklessness. And you show up at the polls on November 3rd, which are the midterm elections in the United States and vote them out.

17:13Miles Taylor:And that may sound trite, but that was the mechanism that the founders of the United States, the authors of the U.S. Constitution designed for these moments. It's ultimately the people themselves who made this almost suicidal civic choice to restore this man to office, and it's the people themselves that can reverse it. And so if the political opposition in this country wants to do something about it, they should focus on making the midterms in this country what I call too big to rig. Such an extraordinary turnout that they decisively add a check on this president by retaking one or both chambers in the U.S.

17:49Miles Taylor:Congress. I mean, it's unsatisfying for people to hear because that's months from now. But that is the likeliest and also the best check on the president. That said, were he to do something that truly shocked the conscience of mankind, had he dropped a nuclear weapon on Iran the other week? Like I said, I'm still not sure that his cabinet would have invoked the 25th Amendment. But there are safety valves that could be undertaken in that moment. And I'll give you an example of one. Right now, the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is effectively three people. if three Republicans in a House of 435 people decided that they were so alarmed by the president's behavior, they could do something quite extraordinary right now.

18:38Miles Taylor:They could decide to caucus with the Democrats. What does that mean? In an instant, three Republican members of Congress could flip control of the U.S. House of Representatives and name a Speaker of the House who is third in line to the presidency. And they could use that chamber to check the president to initiate impeachment hearings to actually impeach him. Now, the Senate's a separate story, but that's a huge check on the president of the United States. That body could decline to issue any additional funding for his war or other activities in addition to impeachment. I mean, there's a lot that could happen.

19:13Miles Taylor:Here's what makes that situation more than just complete political fantasy. There are 39 Republicans who are retiring from the House of Representatives this year. One of the highest watermarks we've ever seen of retirements. Most of those are so-called moderate Republicans who are really fed up with working in Donald Trump's Washington. And most of them aren't running for some other higher office. They're just leaving politics. And so they have a lot less to lose than they normally would. I'm not saying this is imminent, but what I am saying is if something really catastrophic does happen, three of those 39 people isn't a whole lot to ask or expect might be willing to stand up and do something historic.

19:58Miles Taylor:And this has happened in U.S. politics before. In 2001, we had a Republican flip in caucus with the Democrats under George W. Bush and throw the Senate into Democratic hands. There's precedent for this. And I'll take it a step further. I'll reveal to you guys today, I've been in text message conversations with some of these Republican members of Congress saying to them, you might want to keep this in your back pocket because just three of you could decide the fate of the country if something extreme happens. And can I ask that response? I mean, what you're saying is if you're on the way out, set fire to it as you go.

20:31Right. What are they saying back to you?

20:33Miles Taylor:I mean, I'll tell you what one of the members of Congress said to me. I'm just going to read it to you. I'm not going to cite who the person is because I want them to be able to consider this as a genuine option. The country faces a perilous moment. I was messaging with this member of Congress, Republican member of Congress, about Donald Trump's behavior the other week. A civil legislation will die tonight. quote, his response was WTF. I don't even understand the thinking here. Can you explain what this man is doing? WTF is he doing? Question mark, exclamation point, question mark, exclamation point.

21:07Miles Taylor:And I got into a back and forth with this individual. And I said, yeah, it's scary, isn't it? And here's what you should consider doing. Just a quiet meeting with two other members of Congress in your party and you guys could decide to do something about this. Now, the response I got was basically, I don't think we're there yet, but it wasn't no. It wasn't. I wouldn't consider that. I'm sorry to be a downer on this, but it's really easy to write WTF with an exclamation mark after it. And it's really hard to be the person that says, yeah, I've actually got the backbone to tumble this administration, which is essentially what would then happen.

21:47And we haven't seen a lot of backbone from your old party. We just we don't.

21:52Miles Taylor:No. And in fact, I would say of those 39 people, most of them we have found have spinal cords made of chocolate pudding. I think that, you know, I think experience has shown that I don't have high expectations for any of these people. But I do have a sliver of hope that if we end up in one of those break glass situations, although I would argue we're in one, but let's say a more broken glass, that there might be a possibility of further checking the man. But look, this is how Donald Trump returned to power is he systematically eliminated or pushed out of the Republican Party, people of conscience.

22:31Miles Taylor:And he's been left with people who, again, have spines of chocolate pudding, or are just completely unflinchingly loyal to the president. What is so sad, though, is there are so many of these types of folks that will privately text message their outrage of Donald Trump, but then go on cable news and laud him to the sky. We'll have more from Miles Taylor in a moment.

23:10Plus instant savings at select resorts in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and top U.S. destinations. Use promo code JUNE26 for these limited-time offers. Start planning today at AppleVacations.com or contact your travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. Forget about a new world order. Right now, there is no world order. From Trump and Putin to their wars on Iran and Ukraine, geopolitics have never been more dangerous or unpredictable. I'm Christiane Amanpour. I'm a foreign correspondent and covered just about every war over the last 35 years. Now, every week on The X-Files, I'm joined by my ex-husband, Jamie Rubin, who was a former advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.

23:59We give you unique insight into the biggest stories in the news. Serge Christiane Amanpour presents The X-Files on Global Player.