The fate of the earth depends on removing Trump from the White House, ASAP

For an unforgettable 12 hours or so on Tuesday, it felt like the end of the world as we know it. And, apologies to R.E.M., it did not feel fine.

That excruciating level of existential angst that I, and probably a lot of you, never want to experience again was triggered by the president of the United States, commander-in-chief of the world’s largest army, and current holder of the U.S. nuclear football, posting that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in Iran.

It must surely have felt like the end times for hundreds of human beings who made their way to sites like the historic White Bridge in the city of Ahvaz, where the would-be sacrificial lambs for a religion that Donald Trump doesn’t understand but freely insults waved Iranian flags and waited for a Tomahawk missile to rain (or “reign,” as Trump said) down on them.

Those would-be martyrs for the Iranian Revolution lived to tell about it. The Armageddon alarm clock was punched “snooze” just before Tuesday’s 8 p.m. Eastern deadline for U.S. and Israeli war-crime attacks on bridges like the one in Ahvaz and on civilian power plants. Instead, the regimes in Washington and Tehran agreed to a 10-day truce that leaves Trump’s America in much worse shape than when his war started.

This pause button produced the most shallow sigh of relief in human history. Trump’s declaration of peace was utterly empty for the families of at least 250 people who were killed after the “ceasefire” in southern Lebanon as Israel plowed forward with its inhumane bombing campaign. And resumption of this inexplicable conflict in Iran feels likely, given that the U.S. regime has achieved none of its initial war aims and lost control of the world’s main oil thruway, the Strait of Hormuz.

And yet Tuesday was also a day of clarity for America, and for the world. The fragile ceasefire announcement didn’t alter the fact that, in publicly threatening a genocide against Iran and terrorizing its people, the president of the United States committed his worst war crime yet, in violation of the Geneva Convention.

Nor can anyone hit the “delete” button on Trump’s embarrassingly profane and unspeakably evil death threats posted on Truth Social, which included a mocking slur against Muslims on Easter, the holiest day in the Christian religions. Going forward, no one except the world’s other worst governments — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a handful of others — sees the United States as a potential ally. Most nations instead now view us much the same way a war-minded regime in Berlin was seen in 1939, as a serious threat to humanity.

But one thing is crystal clear after Trump’s 12 hours that shook the world.

The flawed American Experiment in democracy, and maybe the world as we know it, cannot survive if the mentally and physically deteriorating Trump is allowed to serve out the final 1,017 days of his term as the 47th U.S. president.

The average amused-to-death American should maybe think of this as a Netflix thriller. A billionaire madman has gained control of the planet’s largest air force and a large cache of nuclear weapons — threatening to conquer nations from Greenland to Cuba, subjugate his own people with troops at home, and nullify the next U.S. election. With the clock nearing midnight, can a ragtag alliance of regular folks stop him from destroying the world?

Call it Red, White, and Blue Dawn, and you can even shout, in the spirit of March Madness, “Wolverines!”

Back in the reality-based world, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the urgent necessity of removing Trump from the White House today, and not on Jan. 20, 2029, finally entered the public discourse during Tuesday’s insanity.

Over the course of that day, in a classic case of better late than never, at least 85 Democratic members of Congress have now called for Trump’s speedy removal from office, either through impeachment in the House and conviction in a Senate trial, or by his Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment and finding him unfit to continue.

“No President in control of his senses would publicly promise to eradicate an entire civilization,” wrote Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy in calling for use of the 1967 amendment, which gives the vice president and a supermajority of the cabinet powers to sideline a president who has lost his mental or physical faculties.

This welcome level of urgency and moral clarity has been surpassed by some leading world figures such as Pope Leo XIV, who grew up breathing in Chicago’s brass-knuckle politics and made an unprecedented papal plea for people to call their Congress member to end the war. In urging peace, the pope said Tuesday that “attacks on civilian infrastructure [are] against international law [and] also a sign of the hatred, the division, the destruction that the human being is capable of.”

“The president of the United States just said that a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the global youth climate activist Greta Thunberg said in an Instagram video on Tuesday. “And no one is reacting. This speaks for itself. What the [bleep] is anyone even doing at this point?”

Thunberg is asking the right question — even after the truce that doesn’t really feel like one. Trump has already committed high crimes and misdemeanors with his Iran war crimes, including not just the recent genocidal threats but the U.S. bombing of two separate Iranian schools killing hundreds of innocent children. The risk of future crimes against humanity increases with each day the president loses more brain cells.

» READ MORE: It took U.S. years to lose a war in Vietnam. Trump lost one in days.

Here is the bad news. The 25th Amendment seems a total non-starter. Even the author of the amendment — still teaching law at Fordham at age 89 — said this week that the relevant clause was intended for a president in a coma, not one clinging to enough sanity to challenge his removal. That’s in addition to the fact that Trump’s cabinet was picked for its fanatical devotion, not its critical thinking skills.

The act of impeachment — which happened twice in Trump’s first term — seems now a certainty in 2027 and could happen sooner, with just a handful of GOP defections, or with Republican resignations or deaths. But despite everything that’s happened in nearly 15 months of utter chaos, it’s today still unlikely that the needed 20 or more of the 53 Senate Republicans would convict him to end his presidency.

There’s only one thing that can change the math.

Us.

Could Americans follow the example of what South Koreans pulled off on Dec. 3, 2024 when their embattled president Yoon Suk Yeon crossed his nation’s line in the sand, by declaring martial law? That night, tens of thousands of protesters surrounded the South Korean parliament and pressured lawmakers to undo the order and ultimately impeach and remove Yoon, beginning a process that has led to his life prison sentence on felony charges imposed this February.

Fortunately, U.S. citizens will soon get a test of what we are capable of this May 1, when the organizers of the massive “No Kings” protests have called for what they hope will be the first-ever successful nationwide general strike — one Friday of no work, no school, no shopping, and large-scale protest. Protesters need to make clear that the goal is Trump’s removal from office, and that disruptions will keep escalating until that happens.

The American carnage that Trump 47 has created in little more than a year will shock humankind for generations to come. Unthinkable corruption, from meme coins to war profiteering to his Caligula-like ballroom fiasco. A perversion of justice — pardoning bad guys and investigating good guys. War crimes from the Minab school to the blown-up fishermen of the Caribbean. Thousands dying needlessly — on American streets from Minneapolis to Buffalo, under desks in their Iranian classrooms, and in squalid ICE concentration camps.

We must stop the killing and the crime spree — not 33 months from now, as Trump’s mental health continues to deteriorate before our eyes, but today. The indisputable truth that the president took America into an undeclared and illegal war for no reason, and lost that war in barely a month, should be the wake-up call for everyone still in denial.

In January, the “doomsday clock” kept by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ticked down to only 85 seconds from midnight. Let’s take possibly our last minute and 25 seconds to stop whining about what is not possible under our system, and instead start thinking outside that box about how to save our fragile world.

We just watched thousands of our fellow human beings in Iran plant their flag on Trump’s target map of their country, jeopardizing their own lives because they thought that might be the thing that saved humanity. We can take action at a much lower level of risk. We must. This is not a moment for doom-scrolling. It is a time for action.