Maybe Trump is a very stable genius

25th Amendment wasn’t meant to facilitate a coup

Michael Wolff ’s new semifictional book about the Trump White House has sparked a renewed wave of overwrought speculation about the president’s mental fitness. President Trump punched back that not only is he a successful chief executive, he’s a “very stable genius” to boot. Dilbert creator Scott Adams took the matter a step further by arguing that proclaiming himself a “VSG” was itself a genius Trump move because that will be his “forever name.”

Diagnosing the president is something of a cottage industry. Some medical professionals seem willing to ignore codes of conduct such as the American Psychiatric Association's “Goldwater Rule,” named for a previous Republican politician liberals thought was unfit to serve, that forbid drawing conclusions about the mental fitness of people they have never examined.

Yale psychologist Bandy Lee suggests what might be needed is an intervention of the sort where “we contain the person, we remove them from access to weapons, and we do an urgent evaluation ... even against their will.” However Lee, who edited a collection of essays entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, acknowledges that this “will really look like a coup, and while we are trying to prevent violence, we don’t wish to incite it through, say, an insurrection.” Even so, she noted that Democratic members of Congress were “already convinced of the dangerousness of the president and the need for an evaluation.”

Behind all this speculation lurks the 25th Amendment, which Wolff claims is “alive every day” at the White House. Trump critics have long fantasized about invoking the little-used amendment to remove him from office, but it is not so easy. By the amendment’s terms, if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet determine the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the vice president immediately becomes acting president. Simple, no?

Well, no. If the president objects to his ouster, he resumes his office. If the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet intervene again, the whole mess is thrown to Congress, where both houses must vote by two-thirds to remove the president, or he stays.

This amendment was never intended to be a coup mechanism. It was put in place for circumstances where a president was legitimately, unambiguously disabled. Not only would such a plot create a genuine constitutional crisis that would undermine public order, and perhaps spark a civil war, it is politically foolish. If the president were in such dire political straits that he was apt to lose two-thirds votes in both houses of Congress, it would be much easier simply to impeach him, which only requires a majority vote on the House side.

In any case, Vice President Pence would never play Brutus in this ridiculous subversion.

Being called unfit for duty puts Trump in good company, not only with Barry Goldwater but also Ronald Reagan. Detroit Mayor Coleman Young called the Gipper “crazy, trigger-happy and dangerous,” which summed up the left-wing critique. Books by disgruntled Reagan administration insiders such as David Stockman, Michael Deaver and Donald Regan also took the president to task for his alleged lack of mental fitness. But Reagan was an outsider who had come to shake up the establishment and restore American greatness, which he did.

The same is true of Donald Trump. He came to politics a novice, prevailed over the best and brightest in both party establishments, and won a race the smart set said he was certain to lose. The presidency was his entry-level job. Since then, he has presided over a booming economy, obliterated ISIS, cut taxes and regulations, reduced unemployment, boosted the stock market, and sent consumer confidence to a 17year high.

Is that crazy? Sounds like what happens when you elect a VSG.