Pence can’t directly invoke the 25th, it requires a bit more. Politically, it might also not be a good idea for him to do it. This is because it would limit him to only one more term of Presidential office beyond the short few day term impeachment would give him. If he waits for Trump to term out, then he would have the potential of two full terms as a President if voted in, not one. NOTE: Removal from office only occurs after the trial portion of impeachment… so we would probably be looking at more than 3 weeks if it was started today. The exception to this is Vice President and Congress by majority – however there is also a time delay here too… up to 21 days…
Currently Trump is effectively a lame-duck, probably trying to keep what he feels is his base ‘motivated’ so that he could start a comeback in 4 years. In reality, his most recent actions have guaranteed that a ‘come-back’ will not happen… ever. The problem is how much of the Republican party he will end up taking down with him.
Trump didn’t do too bad as President – despite what some people might feel.
Economy did well up until the Pandemic.
Economy did not collapse during the Pandemic despite the dramatic shut down. Power’s still on, food is still available, very few additional people homeless, no 1929 repeat. He did not do the ‘doom and gloom’ which would have completely collapsed the market. There are more than just fundamentals that drive the market. There is also a hard to quantify aspect related to people/companies willing to take the financial risk to make a new product, build a company etc. If people don’t feel safe, they will just sit on their cash – which happened in the Great Depression.
The initial reports from China and WHO were saying that the virus was nothing to worry about, but when facts came out – money was dispensed to get a vaccine, money was dispensed to people who lost income/jobs. yes, Trump talked about the virus being a no big deal. It may have been to keep people from panicking, it could have been for other reasons. For most people, this virus was just a bad flu. NOTE for comparison: in 1918, the ‘Spanish’ flu deaths were 675,000 in the US, 50million world wide. US population was 99million, world population 1.9billion. Current US population is 331 million, world population 7.8Billion. Scaling 1918 flu deaths to current population would mean 2.26million US deaths compared to 361,000 current COVID deaths, 205.26million world wide deaths, compared to 1.88million COVID. By the way, the 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu is also known as A/H1N1, which should sound familiar – it still comes around…
While Trump did not get a Treaty with North Korea, one has to remember that North Korea violated the previous Treaties with the US with respect to stopping nuclear weapon development. No Treaty with sanctions in place is better than a Treaty without the ability to verify.
Same as above for Iran.
While Russia has been a thorn in the US’s side for a long time, China in many ways is worse. Forced technology transfer, non-reciprocation of deals(re-writing deals when it became their turn to deliver). At least Trump finally recognized China for its current behavior.
At this point though, all of Trumps current actions will way overshadow any of the good of earlier. It is not a good way to bookmark his presidency…
