The Evidence
Continuing Reasons why the 25th Amendment is still center stage in a failing presidency.
On Tuesday, Congress did its job for the first time in a generation — and voted, in both chambers, to end an undeclared war. On Wednesday night, after a closed-door tantrum from the president, two Republicans folded. Meanwhile, wounded soldiers tell CBS News the Pentagon downplayed their injuries to mask the cost. This is what a leadership failure looks like.
Eight protesters. A combined 450 years in federal prison. A "terrorism" designation invented by executive fiat. The Prairieland sentencings are the first major harvest of a presidential machinery built to criminalize opposition itself — and the country must reckon with what comes next.
A bipartisan housing affordability law — years in the making, passed by veto-proof margins, backed by his own administration — was sitting on a signing desk in Statuary Hall. The President walked away from it on Truth Social. The signing desk stayed empty. American families looking for a home are now collateral in a separate fight to restrict who can vote.
The Washington Post's 25,000-page investigation into Tulsi Gabbard's alleged decades-long submission to a Hare Krishna cult leader is also an indictment of the president who handed her the keys to America's intelligence apparatus — and of a vetting machine that did not care to look.
Itamar Ben-Gvir's vow to burn Lebanon was not a slip — it was the predictable yield of an alliance Donald Trump has reshaped in his own contradictory image. The world condemned a cabinet minister. The president called Israel's prime minister "crazy" on a Monday and a "warrior" by Thursday. A Constitution written to handle exactly this kind of presidential drift sits waiting for someone to read it.
A new ProPublica investigation documents an administration quietly refusing to spend billions in foreign aid that President Trump himself signed into law. The Constitution calls Congress the power of the purse. The White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and the State Department are calling that bluff — and the constitutional crisis is no longer creeping. It is here.
For eighty years, the architecture of Western security — NATO, the dollar order, America's word — has been the inheritance of every president who walked into the Oval Office. In eighteen months, this one has set fire to the lot, and the only question left is whether the Constitution still contains a tool equal to the wreckage.
A federal judge gave the Trump administration one job: put it in writing, under penalty of perjury, that the $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded payout machine for the president's allies is dead. They refused. What that refusal tells us about this presidency — and about the constitutional remedies the country still has — is no longer a matter of speculation.
An American president invents a humiliating story about a sitting head of state, lashes out over a war his allies refused to join, and shreds a decades-old partnership — all over a photo at the G7. This is not diplomacy. It is decompensation. And the United States Constitution provides a remedy for it.
A million taxpayer dollars allegedly funneled to a hand-picked unit of FBI loyalists — some on the director's drinking-buddy security detail, some on a so-called "Payback Squad" hunting political enemies. The cash buys two things: loyalty, and silence. Both are now in the congressional record.
A $14 million vanity project — peeling, algae-choked, and steered to a Mar-a-Lago neighbor without a competitive bid — has become the most honest mirror of Donald Trump's second term that the National Mall has ever produced. The pool reflects what we should already see.
A war the president started without Congress, ended with a memorandum the president cannot enforce, after 109 days that killed thousands, drained one hundred billion dollars from American households, and produced a nuclear arrangement weaker than the one he tore up eight years ago. The deal is signed today. The bill is now permanent.
On Friday the president unveiled a gold-trimmed Boeing 747, gifted by Qatar, as the new Air Force One — a “free” jet that will cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars to make safe, and the country far more in the precedent it sets. It arrived in a summer when nearly half of American households cannot cover their own necessities and the planet edged past yet another temperature record. This is what the administration chose to celebrate.
On June 12, the Trump administration gave Anthropic ninety minutes to disable its flagship Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. The order, justified by a "verbal" and "narrow" jailbreak claim, halted a flagship American technology three days after its launch — and exposed once again a presidency that mistakes impulse for strength, retaliation for governance, and grievance for national security.
A federal judge ordered Donald Trump's name removed from the Kennedy Center. The administration obeyed only after midnight — and then hung a tarp where the letters used to be. The legal filings reveal more than vanity. They reveal an executive branch losing its grip.