25th Amendment Time: An Open Letter to JD Vance

The beginning of a series encouraging the Vice President to take history into his hands and do the right thing for America. Destiny is here for Peter Thiel's man.

Dear Vice President JD “Just Dance" Vance,

You knew this would happen, didn't you? You must have.

You specifically jumped onto the Trump boat—which you correctly identified as a German U-Boot back in 2016—knowing it would go down sooner than most people expected. And you knew that, when it did, you could be right there, in the thick of it, perfectly positioned to plug the leak.

No doubt you’ve seen this firsthand, behind closed doors, for some time now. At least, we hope he lets you in on that kind of thing! But the truth of it has now become indisputable, just as it did a year or so ago, with another commander-in-chief:

The president no longer has the mental fitness to perform his constitutional duties.

You, buddy, are fucking lucky. You're also someone who deeply needs his ability to use the First Amendment on social media.

You know damn well that only dementia or brain worms or too much lead leaking out of the bones could account for this degree of derangement, claiming that it's illegal for TV networks to criticize him and threatening to revoke their broadcasting licenses, not to mention answering about constructing a ballroom when asked how he's handling his good friend's assassination.

And you know about the physical problems, too. You know he's sick, and things are getting serious.

And—sorry—can he really not pronounce the word “acetaminophen?”

So, JD—can we call you JD?—let us take a moment here to remind you of how the 25th Amendment works. You and a majority of the Cabinet can choose to remove the president and replace him with yourself. Really, it's a big part of what you’re there for.

Yes, yes; the president can challenge this. If he does, it then requires a 2/3rds vote of both the House and the Senate to actually remove him.

Thus, you and the Cabinet would only move forward with this if you had dead certainty that Congress would support you. But honestly, if it gets so bad that you're weighing implementing the 25th Amendment—so bad that no distraction and no amount of spin can excuse it—then ideally, you will, indeed, have that level of support in Congress.

This will be especially likely if you frame the situation this way: Trump can't be elected again under the current iteration of our Constitution. And he’s old! He's so old that, if he lives through this term, he’ll finish as the oldest sitting president we’ve ever had.

In other words, staying on his good side will only help any of you for the next few years, max. There aren't too many people whose careers Donald Trump could still make or break.

Now, how exactly might you pull this off? What would be your catalyst? Will you have to hope he goes on a ketchup-throwing rampage when Jimmy Kimmel returns to the airwaves? What could Trump do next that would be so embarrassing, so dead wrong or so clearly a lie, so utterly indefensible that 2/3rds of the legislative branch would support his removal?

You may not need to draw on your Yale smarts at all to answer this question.

Just watch for the moment when Trump starts turning on his own supporters. And that will happen. It always happens with authoritarian leaders. It's certainly already started happening over the last six months as some voices have dared to express tepid opposition to some of Trump's excesses.

But now, Trump, Pam Bondi, and fucking Stephen Miller are threatening to persecute TV networks, nonprofits, and Office Depot workers who exercise their First Amendment rights in ways that displease them. This amounts to spearing a central sacred cow upon which the Trump coalition has been built—particularly as exemplified by Elon Musk and his platform:

Free Speech Absolutism

It will start happening sooner than we expect if Trump is allowed to continue down this road of trying to suppress the practice of First Amendment-protected rights: If that's tolerated, he will only be further emboldened and start going after those on the edges of his coalition—the ones who aren't agreeing hard enough.

At that point, the alliance he has crafted will start to collapse until we reach the point where Trump has grown so wildly unhinged and over-the-top crazy that removal not only becomes viable, but is clearly morally necessary, even to those who remain so confused about Good and Evil that they continue to support the man today.

And you, Vice President Vance, surely saw this coming. Peter Thiel may even have clued you in and instructed you to simply perform your role and wait. Thiel wants you as president, and his support of Trump has always been entirely pragmatic and cynical, a way for him to act as president by proxy, using you as a sort of cardboard cut-out to hide behind.

Kind of like what Musk tried to do with Trump. Exactly like that, come to think of it.

Well, Thiel has won this battle. He's played it well, and now it's time to move forward with the plan before Trump can do any serious, permanent damage.

So how about it, bud? You ready to leap to hero status, saving the country from an old man who has now lost his mind and can in no way be trusted to command the most powerful military in the history of humanity?

And on that note: Before you squawk about how we didn't publicly plead with Vice President Harris to similarly yank President Biden out by the 25th Amendment, we have no problem saying we wish we'd been able to. He had always acted sort of dopey, and we didn't know what kind of shape he really was in until that debate in June of 2024, when he announced that “we finally beat Medicare!"

After that, we knew implicitly that he shouldn't even run. Not just because of how badly he'd have lost, but on a human level—and this applies to Trump, too:

These guys are in or very near their 80s. Would you want your dad or your grandpa to still be working a high-pressure job at that age? And hey: There are high-pressure jobs, and then there's being the leader of the free world. That's too much to ask for any octogenarian, be they Republican or Democrat.

No, that season of life should be spent with family, not flying all over the world, campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize, going on little retreats with dictators, bulldozing rose gardens and telling reporters that criticizing you is illegal, or that you’ve heard many people say that maybe they'd like to have a dictator, or that you don't care how to reunite this country.

Plus, as we said—the guy is obviously physically ill, too.

But you, JD? You're nearly half Trump's age. You're in the prime of life, and you know Donald Trump will not look out for you the rest of your life: He can’t. You know that an uncritical association with him will eventually come back to bite you—and you must also know that at some point, it really will be time for millennials to lead.

Maybe it starts with you, dude! Why not?

We'll follow up soon with further assessments of the developing situation with recommendations for how to take action.

Warmest regards,

David Swindle and Sally Shideler Swindle

Death Wizard of the Mojave Desert in Service of the God of Israel and editor, respectively

See previous GOTD open letters to Trump administration officials:

---