Donald Trump “has no idea what he’s doing” in Iran, Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury told MS NOW’s Alex Witt Sunday as the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz escalated.
After Iran halted the reopening of the Strait on Saturday over the U.S. blockade on its ports — in addition to firing on two vessels — New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury called into MS NOW’s “Alex Witt Reports.”
Responding to Trump’s Saturday assertion that peace talks with Iran are going well and that the war will be over soon just as tensions only seemed to be rising, she ripped Trump for having “no idea what he’s doing.”
“I think it’s very clear — the statement you just played from the president makes clear that this president has no idea what he’s doing and is not fit to be serving as our commander-in-chief. He doesn’t know if he’s going to drop bombs, he doesn’t know what his strategy is, he doesn’t know what his exit strategy is, he doesn’t know how he’s gonna get the Strait of Hormuz reopened.
“It’s very clear since Day 1 that the president agreed to go into this war that he has not only provided appropriate justification to Congress and to the American people, but that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And that is not only threatening the lives of our service members, we had 13 killed, hundreds with severe brain injuries, thousands of civilians have been killed, Lebanon has over a million people displaced. And all of this because there is a madman in the White House who doesn’t have a clue how to lead his way out of a paper bag, and he is putting our troops in harm’s way.”
That’s in all the reason Stansbury is seeking to have the president removed from office by invoking the 25th Amendment, co-sponsoring a bill with Rep. Jamie Raskin that would begin the process of removing Trump from office.
The effort to invoke the 25th amendment has the support of 50 Democrats, Witt said, but to succeed would need to be supported by members of the president’s cabinet.
There are “only two legal mechanisms to remove a sitting president, other than him voluntarily resigning or leaving office because of natural reasons,” Stansbury explained. “The only two constitutional mechanisms that we have is impeachment … there have been multiple impeachment files and articles filed in Congress but there is not the political will within the Republican Party.”
“The second is the use of the 25th Amendment, which was adopted after JFK died, which allows the cabinet and the vice president to assess that the president is no longer fit,” she continued. “Now politically speaking we know that the vice president is still doing the bidding of the president and has not acknowledged that clearly the president is gone crazy and not fit half of the time that he is making public statements about the war and Pope Leo and claiming to be Jesus Christ.”
At present, there’s not enough political will to pass the bill, Stansbury told Witt, “But what I can say unequivocally from the polling, from my district, from the calls we get every day into my office, is the American people overwhelmingly seem to view what is happening right now as completely unacceptable, and they see the statements that the president is making and can see with their own eyes that he is not fit to serve right now.”
Watch the interview with Rep. Stansbury in the video above.
