USA TODAY International Edition
WHAT IF TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND?
Perhaps President Trump will govern like a genius and fulfill in some measure his campaign pledge to Make America Great Again. Or perhaps our worst fears will be realized and bizarre behavior will become impossible to ignore. If we reach that point, an important question will become: Even if Trump does not commit high crimes or misdemeanors, can he be removed from the presidency?
In drafting the Constitution, our Founding Fathers spent much more time contemplating how to select a president than how to get rid of one. The Succession Clause in Article II specifies that in the case of a president’s “inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office,” his powers devolve to the vice president. The framers left it to Congress to work out further details.
25TH AMENDMENT
Only after the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the matter clarified by enacting the 25th Amendment. It sets up two paths for handling an incapacitated president who cannot or chooses not to declare himself unfit. The determination could be made by the vice president and “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments,” or by some “other body as Congress may by law provide.”
It might seem churlish to bring this up now, but not so long ago, we were perpetually astonished that someone with so many obvious signs of narcissistic personality disorder and impulse control disorder could come so far.
Even those favorably disposed toward Trump were expressing fear. “Do you realize our candidate is mental?” Ann Coulter said about Trump in March. “When you act as if you’re insane, people are liable to think you’re insane,” Peggy Noonan wrote in The Wall
Street Journal in August. Andrew Ferguson, while holding open the possibility of a “successful presidency,” worried this month in the same newspaper that “unfortunately, the candidate who campaigned as a sociopath shows signs he may yet govern as one.”
Some of those signs — more properly, symptoms — remain manifest. “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!” Thanks to tweets like that, doubts about Trump’s mental stability persist. His preoccupation with his “many enemies,” coupled with his claim that the intelligence com- munity has been engaged in a “witch hunt” against him — “something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do” — suggest elevated levels of paranoia particles in his cerebrum.
The verdict on Trump’s mental status will be out for some time. And it’s conceivable that there is more method than madness here: The tweets and other headline grabbers could be well- calculated diversions in the service of an objective not yet apparent to those who do not comprehend Trump’s tactical brilliance. On the other hand, his flabbergasting streamof- consciousness address to the CIA suggests some degree of detachment from reality.
However close we are to a problem, presidential incapacity in a 70- year- old man will never be out of the question. It has certainly been an issue in America’s past, mostly from physical causes.
In 1813, James Madison was laid critically ill with a fever for three weeks. James Garfield was shot by an assassin in 1881 and lingered for 79 days before succumbing. Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke that was kept hidden from the public for a staggering 519 days. ‘ I AM IN CONTROL HERE’ Dwight Eisenhower had a massive heart attack in 1955, and then a stroke in 1957 that left him briefly unable to speak. He drafted a letter giving Vice President Nixon the power to decide whether to assume presidential power if he were again incapacitated and unable to communicate. The issue resurfaced dramatically with the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan while Vice President George H. W. Bush was incommunicado on an airplane. That’s when Secretary of State Alexander Haig notoriously and incorrectly blurted out: “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House.”
Incapacitation by insanity is not something we have much experience with. The closest might have been in 1974, as the Watergate scandal was closing in on Nixon, when he began drinking heavily and close aides worried about his mental status. The 25th Amendment was not invoked, yet Defense Secretary James Schlesinger violated the chain of command and ordered the military to intercept all emergency orders, especially any involving nuclear weapons, and convey them to him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for clearance.
None of these precedents but the last is pertinent to the situation we’d face if President Trump went off his Oval Office rocker. It is impossible to forecast how such a dangerous scenario would play out, but we do know this: “25th Amendment” would be the two words on everyone’s lips.