BY ADI COHEN
In another week of explosive revelations regarding President Donald Trump, former FBI Director James Comey and the details surrounding the Russia investigation, there’s been a significant increase online in talking about impeachment and how the process works. But a discussion on another path to potentially remove Trump from office hit an all-time high on Twitter this week: Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.
On Wednesday, the 25th Amendment was mentioned more than 18,000 times on Twitter, the highest number of mentions on the topic in a single day in the platform’s history, according to data produced by Vocativ. Talk of the section, which would offer the White House a way to give authority to the vice president if “the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and potentially a two-thirds vote from Congress, saw record numbers on both Twitter and Wikipedia this week.
According to an analysis of the rate of tweets mentioning the amendment, the news of Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel for the Russia probe was the low point for tweets. But the president’s Thursday morning tweets, including one that claimed he was a part of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history,” brought about another spike in the number of mentions of the 25th Amendment.
That same day, the Wikipedia page for the amendment was viewed more than 50,000 times, which is 10 times more than the daily average of views in the last three months, according to Vocativ’s data.
There’s also been media coverage of the 25th Amendment, most noticeably from conservative columnist Ross Douthat’s Tuesday piece in the New York Times.
“This will not get better,” Douthat wrote. “It could easily get worse.”
