'Cognitive decline in real time': Ex-CNN reporter says it's time to discuss Trump's removal
In an article published in his Substack Sunday, senior journalist and former CNN political commentator Jim Acosta argued that President Donald Trump’s behavior and proposals reflect a degree of mental decline that now demands serious consideration of invoking the 25th Amendment.
Acosta said this is not mere partisanship, but a response to what he called mounting and alarming evidence that Trump is no longer fit to lead. "This is not a 'take the keys away from grandpa' (or cell phone) moment. It is time for a serious discussion about the 25th amendment to the U.S. Constitution," he wrote.
The 25th amendment establishes a process to fill a vice‑presidential vacancy and allows for a temporary transfer of presidential authority to the Vice President, either at the President’s own written declaration of incapacity or via a declaration by the Vice President together with a majority of the Cabinet
Acosta began with what he views as a recent example: a Truth Social post in which Trump claimed, falsely, that “THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD OF JANUARY 6.”
He notes that Trump was president at that very moment, making the claim not merely false, but astonishing in its detachment from fact.
"If there is one thing Truth Social is good for these days, it is that it somewhat reliably tracks the 79-year old president’s cognitive decline in real time. Just a few weeks ago, Trump apparently accidentally posted on that same account what was supposed to be a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi, directing her to indict his perceived political enemies," the analyst said.
Acosta cataloged a series of episodic lapses: a garbled pronunciation of “acetaminophen” while warning Americans against Tylenol, and Trump’s embrace of conspiracy‑laden claims about autism tied to circumcision — amplified, in Acosta’s view, by his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Acosta maintained that these instances are not isolated oddities but symptoms of a deeper problem: Trump’s growing fixation on sweeping and unconstitutional powers. He points to Trump’s calls to invoke the Insurrection Act, an antebellum statute allowing the military to intervene in domestic unrest, as a kind of obsession.
He argued that no rational president would seriously consider deploying the U.S. military in American cities, especially when violent crime rates are historically low. He warned that this impulse is both unconstitutional and dangerous.
"Any consideration of Trump’s alarming mental state was absent from the news coverage surrounding his incendiary speech to the nation’s generals at Quantico late last month, when the president declared that the U.S. military should be sent to American cities for training purposes," he wrote.
Acosta further wrote that rational debate about a president’s capacity is not off limits: under the 25th Amendment, the vice president and cabinet could declare the president incapacitated. He lamented that those who would make such a judgment, among them Vice President J.D. Vance and cabinet officials like Kennedy, are themselves political actors with conflicts of interest.
“The thought of Trump’s latest ‘dear leader’ cabinet coming to our rescue is an insane notion, to be sure.”
The writer framed the moment as a failure of collective will: Americans and institutions are refusing to confront a looming threat. He argued that denying Trump’s mental and behavioral decline is a form of normalization and gaslighting, and that the consequences of inaction could prove catastrophic.
