A left-wing author who built his career writing about Donald Trump is now urging congressional Republicans to remove the president from office, based on unverified claims about nuclear weapons discussions involving Iran.
Seth Abramson, who has written three books about Trump, took to social media on Monday to demand that Republicans "impeach and remove this man quickly to save the planet." His call came after reports surfaced alleging that the Trump administration is considering the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, though Abramson did not identify the specific source of those reports in his posts. Alternet reported on Abramson's statements and the broader context of the claims.
The demand amounts to a familiar pattern: opponents of the president seize on fragmentary or single-source claims, skip past verification, and leap straight to the most dramatic remedy the Constitution allows. Abramson's case rests not on official records or confirmed policy decisions, but on social media posts, recycled anecdotes from former officials with their own axes to grind, and a former congresswoman's unverified assertion.
In his first post, Abramson wrote that he wished Republicans were "capable of actually coming around and understanding they need to impeach and remove this man quickly to save the planet." He added: "I mean all of us. Their families, my family, their friends, my friends." A follow-up post escalated the rhetoric further.
Abramson claimed in that second post:
"It seems increasingly likely that one day Americans are going to awaken to a mushroom cloud in the Middle East and the beginnings of a World War without a single politician in D.C. having taken a single meaningful step to remove an unambiguously psychopathic president from power."
That language, predicting mushroom clouds and labeling the sitting president "psychopathic", is not the vocabulary of sober constitutional argument. It is the vocabulary of someone trying to manufacture panic. And the factual foundation beneath it is remarkably thin.
Abramson pointed to a post from former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote on Monday that Trump and his advisors "are discussing using nuclear weapons on Iran in strategy meetings." Greene added: "It's real. I'm not speculating, I know. And it's pure evil." Greene offered no documentation, no sourcing, and no specifics about which meetings or which officials were involved. The claim stands entirely on her word.
Democrats have long treated impeachment less as a constitutional safeguard and more as a standing political option. During Trump's first term, Democrats openly previewed plans for aggressive investigations aimed at building removal cases before any specific high crime was even alleged.
To build his argument, Abramson also leaned on claims attributed to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's first term. Taylor has claimed he "watched Donald Trump talk about nuclear weapons like they were presidential toys" and that Trump "may be closer to playing with them than you think."
Taylor further asserted that during Trump's 2017 confrontation with North Korea, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis began preparing DHS officials for nuclear conflict. Taylor said DHS ran "exercises for a potential real-life nuclear strike on American soil" for the first time in the department's history, "because frankly, we couldn't rule out that our own president might take us into such an apocalyptic situation."
Those are dramatic claims. They are also single-source claims from a former official who has been a vocal public critic of Trump for years. Taylor's assertions are not corroborated by any official DHS records, any statements from Mattis, or any independent reporting cited in the material supporting Abramson's posts. Readers are asked to take Taylor at his word, and Taylor has a well-established political motive to present the worst possible interpretation of his former boss's conduct.
The broader pattern of using impeachment as a political instrument is not limited to Trump's opponents in Congress. One House Democrat recently filed an impeachment resolution against Chief Justice John Roberts, and could not find a single co-sponsor.
Abramson's broader argument also draws on anecdotes from the 2016 campaign. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough reportedly said that a foreign policy adviser came away from a briefing with candidate Trump rattled because Trump asked, three separate times, some version of the question: "If we have nuclear weapons, why can't we use them?" That account is attributed to Scarborough's on-air statements, not to the adviser directly, and not to any official record of the briefing.
Separately, Trump told The New York Times during the 2016 campaign that he was not sure it "would be a bad thing for us" if Japan built its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea. He told CNN's Anderson Cooper that Saudi Arabia should have nuclear weapons, "absolutely." Those statements, whatever one makes of them, are nearly a decade old. They reflect campaign-trail remarks, not executive orders or operational decisions.
The leap from "a candidate said something provocative about nuclear deterrence in 2016" to "the sitting president must be immediately removed from office in 2025" requires a great deal of connective tissue that Abramson does not provide. He fills the gap with alarm, not evidence.
Congressional debates over presidential war powers and Iran policy have been ongoing for years. House Republicans previously pulled a scheduled vote on a Democrat-sponsored war powers resolution targeting Trump's Iran campaign, a fight that reflected genuine constitutional tensions but did not come close to impeachment.
The first Trump impeachment, during his first term, demonstrated how quickly the process can become a partisan exercise. During those Senate proceedings, lead House manager Adam Schiff closed his arguments with character attacks on the president and appeals to the Constitution. As Breitbart noted at the time, Schiff's character-based arguments would ordinarily be barred under Federal Rules of Evidence in a standard court of law, but Chief Justice Roberts did not enforce ordinary procedural protections for the accused.
Schiff told the Senate: "You know you can't trust this president to do what's right for this country. You can trust he will do what's right for Donald Trump." That framing, trust-based, not evidence-based, is the same approach Abramson is using now. The argument is not "here is what the president did, and here is the law he broke." The argument is "this person cannot be trusted, so remove him before something bad happens."
That is not how impeachment is supposed to work under the Constitution. The Founders designed removal as a remedy for specific high crimes and misdemeanors, not as a preemptive strike based on what critics fear a president might do. Abramson is not alleging a crime. He is alleging a mood.
Internal Republican dynamics make the demand even less serious as a practical matter. Trump maintains broad support within the party, and even internal GOP tensions over Senate leadership have not produced anything resembling an appetite for removal proceedings.
The single most concrete claim in the entire chain, Greene's assertion that nuclear weapons use against Iran is being discussed in strategy meetings, remains completely unverified. Greene provided no documentation. No other official, current or former, has publicly confirmed her account. The quoted text of her post appears to begin mid-sentence, suggesting the full context may not even be fully available.
Greene called the alleged discussions "pure evil." That characterization is her own. But a former congresswoman's social media post, standing alone, is not the kind of evidence that justifies the most extreme constitutional remedy available. If the claim is true, it deserves serious investigation through proper channels, not a social media cascade ending in demands for immediate removal.
The pattern is worth noting plainly. An unverified claim surfaces on social media. A partisan author amplifies it. Old anecdotes from hostile former officials get recycled to build atmosphere. And within hours, the word "impeach" is trending, all before a single fact has been confirmed by anyone in a position to know.
Americans who lived through the last decade of impeachment politics, including an Air Force officer disciplined for staging a uniformed impeachment protest on the Capitol steps, have seen this cycle before. The accusation comes first. The evidence, if it ever arrives, comes later. And the political damage is the point.
If opponents of the president have real evidence of reckless nuclear policy, they should produce it. Until then, demanding impeachment based on social media posts and recycled grievances is not constitutional stewardship, it is political theater dressed up as a crisis.