How Donald Trump can be removed from office if he keeps up unhinged behaviour

 Donald Trump tried to warn you. All the way through the 2024 campaign, he told you he wanted to own Greenland. He repeated the words "mass deportations" dozens of times in every rally.

He never backed down from insisting he didn't lose the 2020 election, and that it was stolen from him. He called the hundreds of people who stormed the US Capitol in a bid to mount a violent coup d'etat on his behalf on January 6th 2021 "patriots" taking part in a day of peace.

And he always promised he'd act like a dictator in his second term - if only for a day. Nobody took any of the above seriously. They're really only just starting to now.

In the first two weeks of 2026 he's already invaded Venezuela which whatever you think of the country's former dictator Nicolas Maduro, is a breach of international law. But no biggie, because he's now saying in interviews that he doesn't need to pay attention to international law, and the only thing that could stop him is his own morality.

He's also threatened to invade Greenland (and on Saturday promised to impose 10% tariffs on a string of countries including the UK after they sent military officers there), Colombia, hinted that Cuba is in a bit of bother, and guilt tripped the winner of the Nobel Peace prize into giving it to him. He's sent twice as many ICE goons to Minnesota as Minnesota has illegal migrants for them to arrest, defended them after one shot an unarmed US citizen, smeared the victim, and threatened to send the military in to crush protests against the invasion.

And that's just in the last 15 days. In his first year back, he's prompted serious questions about his mental and physical health, rolled out the red carpet for Putin, deported innocent people to a torture gulag in El Salvador, deployed the military to quell peaceful protests, tried to literally re-write the history of January 6th, knocked down parts of the White House and repeatedly tried to rig this year's mid-term elections. He's also openly mused about cancelling elections altogether.

He repeatedly talks about a "third term" - musing about how one could come about, despite it being obviously illegal and unconstitutional. And he's openly joked about the idea of using a war as a pretext for cancelling future election and complained that he's done so much for the country that it shouldn't even be having midterms.

These are not normal times. This is not a normal presidency. We're just a year in - but it's not unreasonable to ask how it might be brought to an end. Here’s how that could happen.

The normal way

The normal way to remove a president from office, especially when they’re in their second term, is very simple. Wait three more years. In a normal presidency, the election cycle starts about half way through - with a primary process kicking off in the final year to pick each party’s candidate.

And then it’s straightforward - if Americans don’t like one candidate, they can vote for the other. But as we’ve outlined above, this is not a normal presidency.

Trump has repeatedly indicated he wants to stay in office beyond the end of his second term. It’s been suggested that even if he’s not allowed to run again, there might be a Vladimir Putin /Dmitry Medvedev situation where JD Vance runs, and if he wins he just lets Trump take over. There’s some that think the 25th Amendment (more of which later) could allow a vice president to legally be elevated to the Presidency for a third term - because the language of the Constitution only bars Presidents from being “elected” more than twice. So JD Vance runs with Trump as his VP, gets elected, invokes the 25th Amendment to step down and lets Trump become president again.

But yeah, waiting and voting is the normal way of doing it. But it relies on the 2028 election actually taking place. The rest of this article is going to explore the what-ifs. What if he won’t leave? What if he tries some of the chicanery above? What if this is an even more abnormal Presidency than we feared?

Congress

There’s two ways you can force a President from office mid-term.

The most well known is Impeachment. And Trump is already the most impeached man in the history of the Presidency.

The process goes roughly thus: The House of Representatives brings impeachment charges. If they’re adopted by representatives on a simple majority vote, the President is impeached.

The Senate then holds an impeachment trial - a full-on courtroom style trial examining whether the President has committed the fabled “high crimes and misdemeanours”.

There would then need to be a two-thirds majority in a Senate vote to convict. No President has ever been convicted. Presidents Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (twice) were all acquitted by the Senate.

Next, let’s look at the maths.

Currently there are 218 Republicans and 213 Democrats in the House.

So the Democrats, at this point, would have to convince eight Republicans to vote to impeach - which you might think isn’t that big a deal. But many of these representatives come from deep red states, where Trump remains inexplicably popular.

And even if they voted to impeach, they need a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict. There are currently 53 Republicans in the Senate and 45 Democrats - with two independent Democrats making it 100.

So to get to the 67 votes you would most likely need to convict, Democrats would have to convince 20 senators to rebel against the President, and frankly, good luck with that.

The next chance to shake up the House and Senate is in November, when Midterm Elections take place. In theory.

But as noted above, Trump has already kicked off a plan to rig these elections by doing a "mid-term" re-drawing of constituency boundaries in several states - starting with Texas.

The move would most likely hand Trump's Republicans five more easily winnable seats in the House.

Democrat states, most notably California, are cooking up plans to redistrict themselves to compensate, but it's unclear whether that'll be enough.

Trump is also starting to make noises about banning postal and absentee voting in the midterms.

And he's ordered a new census to be done - several years before the next one is due - and ordering it to eliminate undocumented people from the count.

Although they can't vote, undocumented people are used to calculate constituency sizes to make sure roughly the same number of people are in each seat.

And while the latest Cook Polling Report prediction moves an unheard of 18 house seats away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats, the Senate is still most likely going to remain in the hands of the Republican Party. That will sap some of Trump's theoretical power away, but makes it just as hard to impeach him and make it stick.