Stephen A. Smith, the sports-media personality turned political commentator, used his "Straight Shooter" podcast Wednesday to deliver a blunt message to Democrats floating the 25th Amendment against President Donald Trump: it will never work, and you already lost the argument.
Smith's remarks came as several prominent Trump critics, including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and Sen. Ed Markey, raised the possibility of removing the president from office following his rhetoric during the ongoing Iran conflict. Fox News reported that Smith dismissed those calls as both constitutionally unrealistic and politically self-defeating.
The pushback matters because Smith is no Republican surrogate. He speaks to a broad audience that extends well beyond conservative media. When even a figure like Smith tells Democrats to "stop it," it signals just how disconnected the 25th Amendment talk sounds outside the party's activist core.
Smith walked his listeners through the mechanics of presidential removal, and the numbers that make it a fantasy. On his podcast, he laid it out plainly:
"To invoke the 25th Amendment, you're going to have to get the vice president to sign off, the Republicans in the House to sign off, cabinet members to sign off, basically declaring him unfit."
That is an accurate summary of the constitutional threshold. Section 4 of the 25th Amendment requires the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare a president unable to serve. If the president contests the declaration, two-thirds of both chambers of Congress must vote to keep him removed. In a Republican-controlled House, the idea collapses before it starts.
Smith didn't stop at the 25th Amendment. He also dismissed renewed calls for impeachment, pointing to the record. Democrats have already filed impeachment articles against Trump-aligned officials over the Iran conflict, and the broader removal playbook has been tried before, twice, without success.
As Smith put it:
"You impeached him not once but twice."
The sharpest part of Smith's commentary wasn't about constitutional procedure. It was about political credibility, and how Democrats exhausted theirs through repeated failed attempts to end Trump's political career.
Smith ticked through the list: two impeachments, a felony conviction, the events of January 6. None of it stopped Trump from winning the White House again. Fox News noted that Trump was convicted in 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged scheme to silence claims of extramarital sexual encounters during his 2016 presidential campaign. Even that didn't prevent his return to power.
Smith's conclusion was direct:
"You got him as a convicted felon, you had the insurrection on January 6, but you forgot to address the fact that the Constitution allows a convicted felon to run for the presidency."
That line captures a failure that Democrats still seem unwilling to reckon with. They spent years pursuing legal and procedural strategies to disqualify Trump rather than building a political case that could defeat him at the ballot box. Voters noticed.
Smith drove the point home without ambiguity:
"You got to beat them, and you didn't do it."
And then, for anyone still clinging to removal fantasies:
"You can't do anything to him... once that didn't stop him from regaining his seat in the White House, you lost all credibility. Shut up."
The 25th Amendment chatter didn't emerge in a vacuum. It followed Trump's rhetoric during the Iran conflict, which has drawn sharp reactions from Democrats across the party. Some have demanded his removal outright, while others have taken more extreme positions, including urging military personnel to defy orders.
Smith, notably, did not dismiss the substance of the Iran situation. He acknowledged that Trump's actions had a strategic logic, particularly regarding the Strait of Hormuz. Smith told his audience:
"We get why Trump may have acted."
He then elaborated on the economic stakes:
"We certainly get an insistence on opening up the Strait of Hormuz because, guess what, 20% of the world's oil goes through there. You can't have them dictating everything because oil prices are going to raise."
That framing puts Smith closer to the position that the administration has articulated regarding the Strait of Hormuz, that securing global oil transit routes is a legitimate national interest, than to the Democratic critics who have treated Trump's Iran posture as grounds for removal.
What Smith described on his podcast is a pattern that conservative observers have tracked for years. Democrats have repeatedly reached for the most dramatic institutional lever available, impeachment, criminal prosecution, constitutional removal, rather than doing the harder work of winning elections and persuading voters.
The 25th Amendment push is only the latest example. It follows the same arc as calls for troops to defy presidential orders and impeachment filings against cabinet officials, all of which share a common thread: an unwillingness to accept the results of a democratic election and work within the normal boundaries of political opposition.
Smith's critique cuts because it comes from outside the conservative media ecosystem. He isn't making a partisan argument. He's making a practical one. The American public watched Democrats try every available mechanism to remove Trump from public life. They watched all of it fail. And then they watched Trump win anyway.
At some point, the question stops being about Trump and starts being about the people who keep reaching for tools that don't work. Smith sees it. The Iran situation continues to evolve, and there are legitimate policy debates to be had about the administration's approach. But those debates require seriousness, not another round of constitutional theater that everyone knows will go nowhere.
When a man who built his career arguing about basketball can see the political dead end more clearly than sitting senators and governors, the problem isn't with the presidency. It's with the opposition.
