Gavin Newsom thought he found his moment.
The California Governor watched President Donald Trump deliver a primetime address on election integrity and immediately ran to his phone to call it a constitutional crisis — the “ramblings of a mad king,” he said.
What happened next, Newsom clearly did not see coming.
Newsom Pulls the 25th Amendment Trigger
Trump spoke from the East Room of the White House in July 2026, laying out what his administration described as alarming vulnerabilities in America’s election infrastructure. Trump announced “the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.” He called on Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, a commonsense measure that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast a ballot — exactly the kind of protection that every serious democracy in the world already uses.
Trump alleged that Chinese hackers compromised 220 million US voter files starting in 2020 and further claimed that electronic voting machines are highly vulnerable to hacking. The Department of Homeland Security had already sent letters to election officials in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. A preliminary review found what could be more than 256,000 noncitizens registered to vote across the four states, and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the department compared publicly available voter registration records with federal immigration data and uncovered thousands of potential matches.
Newsom wasn’t interested in any of that. Newsom ignited an online firestorm when, in response to Trump’s election integrity speech, he suggested it was time to invoke the 25th Amendment, calling it “the rambling of a mad king” and saying “the only thing missing in Donald Trump’s speech was tin foil.”
Newsom said Trump “wants to rig the election in 2026,” that “he knows he is going to lose,” and that “that’s what that whole thing was about.”
Other Democrats rushed to pile on. Democratic influencer Harry Sisson wrote on X that Trump is “mentally deranged and unfit to be president.” Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) added her voice too. Ansari wrote, “He lies with every breath he takes. How can anyone deny the urgency of the 25th Amendment at this point?”
The RNC Reminds Everyone What Democrats Spent Four Years Doing
The Republican National Committee did not wait long to respond.
“You literally propped up a vegetable and lied to the American people about his cognitive decline for four years and never mentioned the 25th amendment once,” the official Republican National Committee X account wrote in response, referring to Republican doubts that Biden had the mental acuity to run the country at age 82.
That’s not a talking point. That’s a documented fact. The House Oversight Committee spent months investigating what actually happened inside the Biden White House. Political operatives like Anita Dunn interfered in medical decisions, blocking cognitive tests to protect Biden’s reelection prospects, and witnesses confirmed that critical executive actions and even presidential pardons were executed without Biden’s direct authorization, signed instead by an autopen. The Committee’s findings were clear: Biden’s top aides concealed his decline, exercised presidential authority without him, and misled the American people.
And where was Gavin Newsom during all of that? Calling Biden one of the greatest presidents in American history.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha wrote on X: “Given Newsom’s defense to this day of President Biden, calling him one of the greatest presidents ever, there’s a saying around sitting this one out that applies here…”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton cut even closer to the bone. “Gavin Newsome wants to remove [Trump] from office for disclosing California could have tens of thousands of aliens illegally registered to vote and that China attacked 220 million voters,” Fitton said.
California Assemblyman Joe Patterson raised a question that Newsom has yet to answer. “Does anyone else think it’s weird that as he talks about Trump rigging an election, he simultaneously asks for the president’s cabinet to remove a duly elected president?” Patterson wrote on social media. “Yeah, Gavin … that would pose no risk to our democracy at all. Get real!”
This Is a Pattern, Not a Moment
Newsom didn’t invent this play. Democrats have been running the 25th Amendment script against Trump for months. Earlier this year, Representative Ansari joined other Democrats like Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) to call for Congress to remove Trump and establish an independent group to review the cognitive state of any president. The group would have included past presidents, physicians, and other experts.
Ansari said in April that “Trump is clearly experiencing severe cognitive decline and leaders from every political affiliation have recognized this” and that “he’s become a national security threat to the United States.”
But here’s the thing about invoking the 25th Amendment against a sitting president whose Cabinet is loyal to him: it cannot work. Any attempt to invoke it would require the support of the Vice President and a majority of Trump’s Cabinet, and therefore the chances of that happening are close to nil. Every Democrat who has raised this knows it goes nowhere. Which means this was never about the Constitution. It was about the midterms.
Newsom is widely expected to run for President in 2028. Every statement he makes right now is a campaign ad in disguise. Newsom, who is considering a 2028 presidential run, urged voters to turn out in record numbers this fall to reject Trump’s agenda and “end Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it.”
And yet the man positioning himself as the voice of Democratic reason spent four years defending a president who, by his own party’s later admission, was not fully running the country. Staffers invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about who was actually making decisions. Pardons went out signed by a machine. The American people were told everything was fine.
Not a peep from Gavin Newsom about the 25th Amendment then.
Newsom’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether he would support the bill backed by Representative Ansari. That silence is its own kind of answer.
The SAVE Act — the legislation Trump called for in his address — is a straightforward protection: prove you’re a citizen before you vote. Democrats call it voter suppression. But the DHS data showing potentially hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states raises a question Democrats have never been willing to answer honestly: if the rolls are clean, why fight the cleanup?
Newsom knows the answer. He just can’t say it out loud.
The 25th Amendment gambit will keep coming. Democrats will keep reaching for it every time Trump says something they don’t like, every time he makes a speech they want to discredit, every time the midterm numbers look bad. But the RNC’s response landed because it told the truth in plain language. You spent four years hiding a president’s decline from the American people. You called it leadership. Now you want to lecture the country about cognitive fitness.
That’s a hard argument to make with a straight face. And based on the reaction online, not many people are buying it.
Sources: Fox News Digital; House Oversight Committee; Judicial Watch; DHS letters to state election officials; Spectrum News; The Hill; ms.now