The House of Cards: On the Fantasy and Reality of Removing a President

Somewhere in the Midwest, a tired parent sits in a darkened room, the only light coming from a small table lamp casting long shadows over a stack of hospital bills. Each envelope is a fresh wave of anxiety, a stark reminder of a system that feels broken beyond repair. They are agonizing over how to pay even one of them when the silence is broken by the buzz of a cell phone. A text from a friend, likely a message of support or a shared complaint about the day. The parent glances at the screen, and their exhaustion is momentarily replaced by pure astonishment.

“I’m going to D.C. next week and do what no one else will,” the text reads. “I’m going to arrest the President on a citizen’s arrest. Do you want to come?”

The message, for all its bravado, is not an isolated fantasy. It is a symptom of a deeper national malady: a rapidly growing frustration that is curdling into desperation. With the President’s polling numbers languishing in the basement and every morning bringing a fresh barrage of infuriating headlines, a significant portion of the populace feels that the normal levers of government are no longer functioning. The slow, methodical pace of the electoral calendar feels like an insult to the urgency of the moment. They are not willing to wait for the 2028 election, or even for the midterms in 2026. They want a restoration of sanity, and they want it now.

This righteous fury, born of real economic pain and political exhaustion, is driving ordinary people to contemplate extraordinary and desperate measures. The idea of a “citizen’s arrest,” however, is a fantasy rooted in a dangerous misunderstanding of law and power. Before exploring the difficult realities of the constitutional tools we do have for holding a president accountable, it is essential first to understand why this particular path leads not to justice, but to certain legal and physical peril.

The fantasy of a citizen’s arrest is a potent one because it speaks to a deep-seated American ideal of popular sovereignty—the idea that the people themselves are the ultimate check on power. The legal and practical reality, however, is a brick wall. Any attempt to physically detain a sitting President, no matter how well-intentioned, would collapse for three immediate and overwhelming reasons: law, the Constitution, and force.

First, the law itself does not provide a mechanism for such an act. “Citizen’s arrest” is a concept derived from a patchwork of state-level statutes and ancient common law, none of which can be used to supersede federal authority. There is no federal statute that grants a private citizen the right to detain the head of the Executive Branch. Any such attempt would be seen not as a lawful arrest, but as an unlawful assault.

Second, and most importantly, is the doctrine of presidential immunity. Long-standing Department of Justice policy holds that a sitting president cannot be criminally indicted or prosecuted while in office. The reasoning is constitutionally foundational: allowing a local prosecutor, or in this case, a private citizen, to arrest and detain the President would fundamentally cripple the Executive Branch and prevent the President from fulfilling their constitutional duties. The Constitution provides its own specific, and exceedingly difficult, remedy for a law-breaking president: impeachment. That process, and that process alone, is the designated path for removal.

Finally, there is the overwhelming reality of physical force. The President is under the constant, mandatory, and lethal protection of the United States Secret Service. Their sole mission is to protect the officeholder to ensure the continuity of government. Any group of individuals attempting to physically restrain the President would not be seen as “citizens making an arrest”; they would be seen as a direct physical threat, equivalent to an assassination or kidnapping attempt. The response would be swift, overwhelming, and potentially deadly. The individuals involved would not end their day in a magistrate’s office, but in a federal hospital or a federal prison, facing a host of felony charges, including assaulting a federal officer.

The path to accountability, therefore, does not run through a vigilante fantasy on the White House lawn. It runs, however difficult and frustratingly, through the mechanisms the Constitution itself provides.

For a public steeped in frustration and hungry for action, the constitutional remedies for a rogue president can feel less like safeguards and more like impenetrable fortresses. There are moments, and this is certainly one of them, when the Constitution can feel as though it is protecting the very corruption and criminality that it was designed to prevent. But this difficulty, this immense barrier to removing a sitting leader, is not an accident or an oversight. It is a deliberate, and in some ways terrifying, design choice.

The framers of the Constitution were students of history, acutely aware of the violent instability that had plagued European governments for centuries. Their primary fear was not necessarily a tyrannical president, but a weak and unstable republic, vulnerable to being torn apart by coups, factionalism, and “random upstart movements that don’t have popular support.” They sought to create an executive powerful enough to govern effectively and stable enough to withstand the passionate whims of the moment. In doing so, they made a profound trade-off: they prioritized the long-term stability of the entire system over the ability to easily remove a single, flawed leader.

The primary tool they created is impeachment. It is a two-part process that is fundamentally political, not criminal. The first step lies with the House of Representatives, which acts as a grand jury, bringing formal charges against the president for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” A simple majority vote is all that is required to impeach. The second step moves to the Senate, which conducts a trial. To secure a conviction and remove the president from office, an extraordinary consensus is required: a two-thirds supermajority vote. In our current era of extreme partisan polarization, however, this safeguard has become a nearly insurmountable shield, allowing a president with unified support from his own party to weather almost any charge.

The other constitutional path is the 25th Amendment. Ratified in 1967, its fourth section was designed for a president who is alive but so incapacitated that he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It is a constitutional palace coup, requiring the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president unfit. The process is a high-stakes drama: the VP becomes Acting President, the President can contest it, and if challenged, Congress must vote. To make the removal permanent requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate, an even higher bar than impeachment.

Finally, there is the untested and highly contentious possibility of the 14th Amendment. Ratified after the Civil War, its third section states that no person who has sworn an oath to the Constitution shall hold any office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” The modern legal argument is that this automatically disqualifies an officeholder who meets the criteria. The insurmountable problem, however, is the question of process. The Constitution provides no roadmap for how to enforce this against a sitting president, leaving it as a powerful legal theory but not a practical tool for removal.

This brings the focus to the only remaining constitutional power: the people themselves. Faced with a political system that feels inert, a vast and growing movement of citizens is preparing to make its voice heard. Across the country, and especially in Washington, D.C., millions of people will gather this Saturday to protest this administration and its numerous failings. Their demand is unambiguous: impeachment and removal. This is not a sudden outburst, but the culmination of years of sustained, democratic effort.

The profound and tragic irony of this weekend’s marches, however, is that there will be almost no one in Washington to see them. Congress, in a move of calculated avoidance, is on recess until September. The President, as is his custom, will almost certainly be spending the weekend out of town. It is a scenario seemingly designed to breed helplessness and contempt, a visual representation of a government that has made itself deaf to the will of a significant portion of its people. And with every unanswered call, every petition filed away, and every protest directed at an empty building, the national frustration grows. The deeply held commitment to keeping all actions peaceful is beginning to shake under the strain of being perpetually ignored.

With legal remedies stalled by political tribalism and popular protest deliberately ignored by an absent government, the only remaining path to removal lies not in the law books or on the streets, but within the gilded, paranoid cage of the President’s own court. The administration’s power structure is a classic Machiavellian house of cards: a system built not on ideology or institutional loyalty, but on a transactional allegiance to a single, powerful figure. The cabinet members, the advisors, the inner circle—they all derive their own power and prestige directly from the President.

This system projects an aura of impenetrable strength, but it contains a single, fatal vulnerability. The loyalty of the court is entirely contingent on the Prince’s ability to protect them. A ruler who can reward his allies and punish his enemies is a ruler to be feared and obeyed. But a ruler who is perceived as weak, one who loses the ability to shield his inner circle from real and/or imagined legal action, is no longer a protector. He is a liability. A single, credible threat of indictment against a key cabinet member would be the tremor that destabilizes the entire structure.

In that moment of perceived weakness, the cold calculus of self-preservation—the ultimate rule of Stendhal’s court—would take over. The transactional loyalty would evaporate overnight. The very courtiers who most performatively praised the President would be the first to see him as a sinking ship, and they would rush to find a new lifeboat. The Vice President would instantly become the new, more viable center of power, and the 25th Amendment would transform from a constitutional footnote into the preferred instrument of a modern palace coup.

The President and his chief advisor are not blind to this vulnerability. In fact, they are actively working to prevent it with classic authoritarian tactics. The Vice President is being kept on a perpetual, nonsensical tour of the country, far from Washington, under the thin guise of “building up support” for the “big beautiful bill” that Congress has already passed. The strategic purpose is clear: to physically isolate the Vice President from the Cabinet, making the necessary in-person conversations for a 25th Amendment conspiracy nearly impossible. This physical separation has become all the more critical after recent events, attributed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have reportedly compromised the security of encrypted group chat applications like Signal, once the preferred method for discreet political communication.

Back in that darkened room in the Midwest, the parent goes online and makes a small payment on the last of the hospital bills. They are unsure how they will buy food for the week, or put gas in the car, or afford new shoes for their growing children. The anxiety is a physical weight, a constant companion. Still, they must continue. They must protect their family at all costs. The cell phone on the table buzzes again, this time with a breaking news alert: a major newspaper has obtained documents linking two Cabinet members to a burgeoning scandal, putting them directly at odds with the President.

Miles away, in a quiet hotel room overlooking the Pacific, another cell phone buzzes with the exact same alert. The Vice President reads the headline, and then reads it again. For a long moment, he is still. Then, a slow, calculated smile spreads across his face. He looks up at his chief of staff.

“Tell the pilot to get ready,” he says. “We’re going back to Washington.”