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As Donald Trump unleashes curse-filled threats against Iran, Democrats are raising alarm over his mental stability and calling for his removal from office – while Republicans remain conspicuously silent.

Democrats are escalating their rebukes as the 79-year-old president delivers rambling, incoherent speeches, hurls puerile insults at US allies and brazenly threatens to commit war crimes. He used an Easter Sunday social media post to warn Iran to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell”.

The president followed up by insisting that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Tehran does not meet his latest deadline to agree to a deal that includes reopening the strait of Hormuz.

By Tuesday afternoon, more than 20 Democratic members of Congress had called for Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment to the constitution to remove a president who is deemed unfit for office.

Rashida Tlaib of Michigan wrote on the X social media platform: “After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide. It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This maniac should be removed from office.”

Ilhan Omar of Minnesota wrote that Trump is an “unhinged lunatic” and demanded: “When will it be enough for my Republican colleagues to grow spines and remove him from office?”

Mark Pocan of Wisconsin added: “25th Amendment RIGHT NOW! Trump is too unhinged, dangerous, and deranged to have the nuclear codes!”

They were joined by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Republican US representative turned Trump critic. She wrote: “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”

Greene had previously warned that Trump has “gone insane”. And since Sunday, other Democrats have broken new ground by questioning the president’s mental health.

Yassamin Ansari, the only Iranian American Democrat in Congress, wrote on social media: “The President of the United States is a deranged lunatic, and a national security threat to our country and the rest of the world.”

But the chances of Trump’s notoriously loyal cabinet turning against him to install JD Vance as president are close to zero. Even as Trump threatens to target civilian infrastructure in Iran in breach of international law, few Republicans have raised any voice of dissent. Many in the party support the war.

Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide turned Democrat, said: “The one mechanism that we know could be executed immediately is the 25th amendment. All that’s standing in the way of the complete annihilation of a civilisation or not is if there are a dozen or 13 Republicans who have a spine, a soul, a conscience and the fortitude to do what they know is right.”

The divide in Washington echoes Joe Biden’s presidency, when Republicans and rightwing media spent years contending that the octogenarian Biden was in cognitive decline and claimed vindication when a feeble debate performance ended his 2024 re-election campaign

Biden’s mental and physical health was a thorny subject for years in Washington. Trump and other Republicans mocked him as senile and forced to depend on an autopen to sign documents. The White House only fuelled speculation by limiting Biden’s public appearances and clamping down hard when media reports tackled the sensitive subject.

The president’s doddering debate performance against Trump in June 2024 left Democrats – and some sections of the media – ruing their failure to grapple with the issue until it was too late. Trump’s current conduct raises the question of what lessons have been learned.

Bardella, a political commentator and contributor on the NewsNation network, said: “If anything, because of what happened with Joe Biden, that should actually increase the level of scrutiny that we have on someone like Donald Trump. Frankly, anyone over 80 that’s in public office at this point, you should be scrutinised. Father Time is undefeated and Donald Trump is no exception to that.

“If it turns out that we find out later on that this was someone who was suffering from dementia or some mental condition that has created deterioration and we’re allowing him to wage a literal war on an entire civilisation, no one should feel good about that. Your place in history will be looked upon with infamy because you knew better and you did nothing.”

Trump is also facing criticism from his right flank. Along with Greene, former Make America Great Again allies such as Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens have described his threats to Iran as a betrayal of his America First promise to end forever wars. Jones, a notorious conspiracy theorist, asked: “How do we 25th amendment his ass?”

Yet Republicans on Capitol Hill, some of whom are longtime Iran hawks, seem impervious and are willing to overlook Trump’s reckless rhetoric. Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “I don’t think anybody is surprised by that because Republicans’ attitude towards this president’s misdoings can charitably be described as supine.

“It is utterly unsurprising that a party, 98% of which has tolerated anything and everything from this president, would continue their cowardly behaviour because there are many Republican members of the House and Senate who are known to be competent and reasonable people who have simply bit their tongues for far too long.”

Trump does not drink or smoke but does love fast food. His defenders insist that he is remarkably energetic, often working through the night and delivering speeches of an hour and a half without even taking a sip of water. However, over the past year he has been unable to hide evidence of hand bruising and swollen ankles.

His mental state is even more contentious. Trump himself repeatedly claims to have “aced” cognitive tests that no other president could. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, asserted last week that he is “always the most well-read person in the room”. Critics find such statements laughable and accuse Republicans of hypocrisy.

Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, commented: “It’s certainly fair for a party that questioned the cognitive competence of the other party’s president to be subject to the same kind of questioning now. If it turns out that, behind the scenes, senior members of the Trump administration are aware of any mental distortion or incapacity on the part of president, history won’t deal with them kindly.”

The Goldwater rule, however, is a convention that psychiatrists should not give an opinion about the mental state of a person they have not examined. Galston added: “It’s very difficult to make psychological judgments at long distance, even though occasionally they may be correct, just because these judgments are very complicated.

“My memory goes all the way back to 1964, when legions of the country’s best psychologists got together to declare that Barry Goldwater was mentally disturbed, which he quite clearly was not, just because he was talking a kind of aggressive language on many foreign policy and domestic issues that a left-leaning psychology profession didn’t like. So there’s reason to be cautious.”