Trump Proposes Anti-Censorship Order, Change to 25th Amendment at Wisconsin Rally

Former President Donald Trump proposed a modification to the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and promised an executive order barring federal employees from engaging in domestic censorship at a campaign rally in rural Wisconsin on Sept. 7.

Speaking in Mosinee, a community of some 4,500 residents, the former president also commented on recent reports of Russian interference in the 2024 election.

Mosinee is located in Marathon County, a solidly Republican area that Trump carried by 16 percentage points in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Wisconsin is one of seven swing states considered critical to winning the White House this year.

Trump said he would support a modification of the 25th Amendment to make it an impeachable offense for a vice president to cover up the incapacity of a sitting president.

Currently, the 25th Amendment empowers the vice president and a majority of the president’s cabinet to elevate the vice president to acting president if they deem the president unable to carry out the functions of the office.

The Trump campaign has alleged that President Joe Biden has been governing with a seeming loss of physical and mental acuity and that Harris has been aware of this but hidden it from the public.

“Kamala Harris lied about it. My Senate Democratic colleagues lied about it. The media lied about it,” vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance said on July 22.

Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21 after some party leaders publicly mounted pressure against his campaign for a second term.

Harris said in a televised Aug. 30 interview that she has no regrets about defending Biden’s mental acuity. “He has the intelligence, the commitment, and the judgment and disposition that I think the American people rightly deserve in their president,” she said.

The most common way to amend the Constitution is for both houses of Congress to pass an amendment by a two-thirds majority vote, which must then be ratified by three-fourths of the state Legislatures.

Trump also promised to sign an executive order barring federal employees from “colluding to limit speech.”

“We will fire every federal bureaucrat who is engaged in domestic censorship” under the current administration, he said.

In recent years the federal government had pressured social media companies to block some posts containing material it considered controversial, including about COVID-19 and vaccines.

“I will bring back free speech in America because it’s been taken away,” Trump said.

Trump also commented on recent reports of attempts by Russia to influence the 2024 election, as it did in 2016.

“Did you see three days ago, it started again,” Trump told the audience in Mosinee. “The Justice Department said Russia may be involved in our elections again.”

On Sept. 4, the U.S. government seized websites run by the Russian government and leveled charges against two employees of Russia’s state media.

“Russia, it’s Russia!” Trump said. “And you know, the whole world laughed at them this time.”

Trump took a moment to remind the audience of the four-year FBI probe launched in 2017 to investigate possible ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Special counsel John Durham examined the FBI’s probe and, in 2023, concluded that the FBI lacked “actual evidence” to investigate the campaign, relied heavily on tips from Trump’s political opponents, and suffered from confirmation bias.

“Nobody was tougher on Russia in history than Trump,” the former president said.

Putin recently endorsed Harris for president.

The Mosinee event was Trump’s last scheduled appearance prior to a debate with Harris on Sept. 10.

The vice president spent the day in Pittsburgh preparing for the debate. She also made a stop at a local retail establishment to interact with students, teachers, and other community members, according to a campaign statement.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.