It's Time to Pull the Plug on Don
By Tom Kagy | 07 Apr, 2026

When a US President threatens "civilizational extinction" after a series of other statements of criminal intent, a sane Congress must invoke the 25th Amendment on an emergency basis.

(Image by ChatGPT)

The latest episode in what has become a truly staggering highlight reel of alarming presidential behavior is the threat — casually pecked out on a social media post — that the US will deliver "civilizational extinction" if Iran doesn't fall in line. 

Giving him all benefit of the doubt would be to see it as a reflection of a deeply troubled mind.  That would be disturbing in an ordinary citizen but is absolutely alarming in a US leader with a proverbial finger on the nuclear button.

And it didn't come in a vacuum.  We've witnessed a daily avalanche of outrages, each one somehow managing to eclipse the last.  

Remember when he casually suggested that a foreign adversary might make a "great real estate deal" out of a NATO ally's territory?  Or the time he floated disbanding an entire federal agency via social media post, with no legislation, no process, and apparently no consultation with anyone who knew what that agency actually did?  Or the repeated, documented pattern of treating classified briefings like inconveniences to be skimmed before getting back to seeking his next ego-gratification? 

The "civilizational extinction" threat isn't a departure. It's the logical endpoint of a long, well-documented arc.

No question but that impeachment is a drastic step, a political nuclear option, a move that will inflame over a third of the country and crimp governance.  There's no doubt that impeachment is disruptive.  It is a constitutional sledgehammer — by design. The Founders didn't include the impeachment clause as a decorative flourish but because they had read enough history to know that executives go off the rails.  They wanted a sane, lawful, democratic mechanism for the legislature to pump the brakes before the nation plunges into a deep abyss.

"High crimes and misdemeanors" — the constitutional standard for impeachment — was never meant to be interpreted as strictly a criminal law standard.   The phrase was borrowed from English parliamentary practice where it referred broadly to abuses of power, to conduct fundamentally incompatible with the trust and responsibility of high office. 

Threatening civilizational extinction — regardless of whether it meets some technical legal threshold — is pretty much the dictionary definition of conduct incompatible with the trust and responsibility of the highest office on the planet.  

If that doesn't meet the bar, it's hard to imagine what would.

Congress has been great at raising eyebrow.  Both sides of the aisle have expressed "deep concern," scheduled hearings, issued statements, then done nothing to check a dangerously, determinedly errant executive.  That might pass muster for normal political controversies like differences over tax rates, immigration policy, fights over the farm aid bill.  But we are no longer in such pastoral territory.  We are at the unthinkable abyss of a sitting president dispensing armageddon talk as though it were a Sunday greeting.

The Constitution gave Congress the tools.  The moment demands its use.  This isn't about party.  Any Republican senator with a conscience — and there are a few, even if they've been quiet lately — should be able to read the situation clearly enough to understand that their oath is to the Constitution, not to one man's political survival.  History won't be kind to elected representatives who saw what was happening and decided to take the path of least responsibility.

Pull the plug, Congress.  Not because it's politically convenient or easy — it's neither.  But because you have a sworn constitutional duty to act when the executive branch threatens the welfare of the nation it has sworn to protect — and the shared world in which we must all live.  

The process exists, as do the evidence and the urgency of the moment.