Wolff says talk of removal is ‘alive daily’
Michael Wolff, the author of the controversial White House tell-all book Fire and Fury, said yesterday that there were grounds to believe US President Donald Trump could be removed from office under the 25th Amendment of the US constitution.
He said talk of the amendment — which states the leader of the US can be ejected from the presidency if he or she was deemed unable to fulfil their duties due to physical or mental impairment — is alive in the West Wing “every single day”.
Wolff suggested the chaos and uncertainty in the White House is worse than his book described.
“If I left out anything, it was probably stuff even more damning. It’s that bad,” he said.
“It’s an extraordinary moment in time. The last several days focused on my book are proof of this. What happened here? What’s going on here?”
The remarks came as the row over the book, repeatedly slammed by Trump as “fiction” and “garbage”, continued to roil Trump’s presidency.
He continued to lash out at his critics yesterday.
“I’ve had to put up with the fake news from the first day I announced that I would be running for President,” he wrote on Twitter.
“Now I have to put up with a fake book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!”
Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, Wolff said he had no preconceived ideas about how the book would turn out and would have been delighted to write about an unlikely president who against the odds was going to succeed.
“[But] he is not going to succeed. It is worse than everybody thought,” he said.
“This is not an exaggeration, and it’s not unreasonable to say this is 25th Amendment kind of stuff. [White House staff] would say ‘we’re not at 25th Amendment level yet’.
“This is alarming in every way and then it went to ‘this is a little 25th Amendment’. So the 25th Amendment is a concept that is alive every day in the White House.”
Wolff went on to defend Steve Bannon. He said: “Steve is a man of very clear beliefs and principles.
“He made Donald Trump president. He went into this campaign, it had imploded, it was over. Steve was the guy who said ‘there is a case here’.”
Experts said that the 25th Amendment was designed with the idea of a president being incapacitated by, for example, a coma. It would lead to them being replaced by the vice-president. — Telegraph Group Ltd,
Washington Post