At What Point Would Republicans Remove Donald Trump from Office?

It is hard to conceive of Republicans opting to remove their cult leader from power, short of his falling into a vegetative state.

When Brain Cell Death Reaches a Critical Point

We face the prospect of a near octogenarian president whose mental deterioration progresses to the point that White House staff would no longer be able to conceal his radically incoherent speech and disturbingly bizarre behavior, which even his most ardent congressional supporters could no longer try to sane-wash. So, the question arises: at what point would Republicans feel they had no other choice than to invoke the Constitution’s 25th amendment and remove Donald Trump from office?

Serious mental health experts have been warning the nation for years about Trump’s compounding psychological conditions, centering on clinically defined personality disorders and dementia.

Just before last November’s election, 233 psychiatrists and mental health professionals stated in an open letter their conviction that “Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for ‘narcissistic personality disorder,’ ‘antisocial personality disorder,’ and ‘paranoid personality disorder,’ all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism.”

Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired Harvard Medical School professor and senior analyst with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, sees clear signs that Trump is sinking into dementia:

Unlike normal aging, which is characterized by forgetting names or words, Trump repeatedly shows something very different: confusion about reality. . . If he were to become president he would have to be immediately removed from office via the 25th Amendment as dangerously unable to fulfill the responsibilities of office.

John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, likewise identifies tell-tale signs of dementia in Trump. One is “phonemic paraphasia,” when an individual can’t complete a sentence or thought. “This is the real breakdown in the capacity to think and use language that are formal diagnostic properties for someone who is experiencing dementia.”

Symptoms include confusing people, names, and generations. For example, during the campaign, Trump said seven times that he was running against Barack Obama instead of Joe Biden and kept confusing Nancy Pelosi for Nikki Haley. He said his father was born in Germany — his grandfather was born in Germany. Gartner says Trump also displays “semantic aphasia” which is when a person uses words that don’t actually correspond to the meaning — for example, Trump referred to the “oranges” of the January 6 investigation, instead of the “origins.” And there were numerous times he succumbed to gibberish, e.g., “covfefe.” Late in the campaign, Trump bizarrely spent 40 minutes on stage lamely jiving to music, speaking not a word.

Last year, over 3,000 licensed medical and mental health professionals signed an open letter attesting that Trump shows clear signs of “probable dementia.” One, Dr. Ankur Butala, wrote:

I am a neuropsychiatrist and movement disorders neurologist at an academic medical center. There is more than enough reason to suspect Dementia including: worsening thought process, looser connections between thoughts, tangentiality, paraphasias, irritability, paranoia, persecutory ideation, impulsivity and so on; which are clearly different than videos of him from 10 years ago. Without personally examining him, I cannot clarify further, but he appears to at least have a cautious gait. The most plausible disorder would be a mixture of frontal lobe dysfunction (sort of like frontotemporal Dementia or CTE) from a vascular Dementia.

Finally, Trump’s father, Fred, was diagnosed with “mild senile dementia” in 1991 at age 86, and with Alzheimer’s two years later. He died in 1993.

The president-elect’s recent rants about annexing Canada and seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland by force are not the words of sane person, nor is his latest nonsense on Truth Social about establishing an “EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources.” It is the importer — not the foreign country or company from which the product was exported — who must pay the tax and then passes the added cost onto domestic consumers.

Last spring, POLITICO’s Jonathan Lemire said on “Morning Joe”:

I covered Trump 15-to-20 years ago and it’s clear he’s not the same guy he was then. And we’re seeing it night after night on the rally stage where he seems to lose control of the English language. . . This is something his team knows, but they’re just forging forward.

Mental Illness — a Rich Presidential Tradition

Donald Trump isn’t the first occupant of the White House with mental health issues. James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce and Abraham Lincoln all suffered from major depressive disorders. It is believed that ten presidents suffered from depression. Theodore Roosevelt was bipolar, as was Lyndon Johnson (LBJ had a penchant for exposing his genitals before others). Woodrow Wilson suffered from a generalized anxiety disorder. Trump’s idol, Andrew Jackson, had an out-of-control temper that got him into over 100 duels. Jackson was wounded so often during his frequent duels that it was said he “rattled like a bag of marbles” and regularly coughed up blood. On the last day of his presidency, Jackson confessed that he had but two regrets: he “had been unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang John C. Calhoun.”

Mental health experts believe that about half the presidents between George Washington and Richard M. Nixon suffered from some sort of psychiatric disorder.

How Long Can the Palace Guard Cover Up the MAGA Mad Hatter-in-Chief?

Jonathan Lemire’s remark, “This is something his team knows, but they’re just forging forward” is telling.

Concealing a leader’s mental fallibilities by the palace guard is nothing new. Journalists covering the White House were frustrated at how Joe Biden’s staff assiduously covered up clear signs of advancing age affecting his mental faculties by limiting unscripted public exposure, especially press conferences. The cover came down during the single Biden-Trump presidential debate with the incumbent president’s disastrous performance.

Ronald Reagan’s staff shielded him as his dementia progressed in his second term, something to which I had personal exposure working on Afghanistan at the State Department at the time.

Woodrow Wilson’s staff performed skillful legerdemain in keeping secret their boss’s incapacitation due to a stroke. First Lady Edith Wilson effectively ran the presidency during the last year-and-a-half of her husband’s second term, the American people none the wiser. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the 25th amendment was enacted putting in place criteria and a process for removing the chief executive from office when “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

In this age of tech-driven saturation coverage and travel requirements, Melania would not be able to replicate her predecessor’s trick. Just as Biden’s staff could pull off their own protective act only so long, Trump’s people would be no more successful, particularly given his already ample display of increasing incoherence and erratic behavior.

Will the GOP Congressional Castrati Finally Restore Their Manhood?

Remember the blue suited/red-tied Manchurian Candidates stomping in lockstep to the Manhattan Federal Courthouse to robotically parrot Trumpisms as their Dear Leader faced justice yet again? Republican politicians who know better out-prostituting themselves with their heart-thumping, mouth-foaming denunciations of the “sham trial,” otherwise known as the rule of law? Their reflexive Foghorn Leghorn-like lambasting of the legal process as totally orchestrated by Joe Biden? And there was Nikki Haley, once viewed as the Great Hyped Hope, diabolically penning “Finish Them!” on an Israeli artillery shell that may very well end the lives of Gazan women and children. And on and on. . . Lil’ Marco Rubio, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Conflicted Susan Collins, Moscow Mitch. Almost all fell in line as witnessed in the two Trump impeachments.

So, we watch in further horror as the Republican Party has transitioned from the Orwellian to the Kafkaesque. In Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka writes about Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a hideous insect. He is initially convinced his new condition is temporary. But being stuck on his back and unable to get up finally makes him realize it is permanent. So it is with today’s Republicans.

If anything, they now quake in even greater fear following Trump’s November victory and his vice-like hold over the Republican Party. They are too aware that of the ten GOP House representatives who voted to impeach Trump for his January 6 actions, only two remain in office, and of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict, three remain in their jobs.

It is hard to conceive of Republicans — particularly the sycophantic extremists who will fill cabinet positions — opting to remove their very own Jim Jones from power, short of his falling into a vegetative state. Meanwhile, buckle up for four years of madness-driven chaos.

The Crazy Uncle in the Attic

Donald Trump reminds me of Teddy Brewster, the crazy cousin in Arsenic and Old Lace who thinks he’s President Theodore Roosevelt. Dressed in African expedition fatigues and brandishing a sword, he loudly storms up the stairs thinking he’s attacking San Juan Hill, leaving all present in a temporary state of shock and confusion. Batshit crazy. Nonetheless, everyone humors him. He gets away with his grandiose delusions because nobody who can puts on the brakes. Just as with Trump.

As of January 20, the patients will be in charge of the asylum. The crazy train will assuredly head off the tracks. America is in trouble. The antidote? Article 2, Section 4 (impeachment) or Article 25 (removal from office) of the Constitution. The time will come to choose one. Get a grip and lock The Donald in the attic with Teddy Brewster, Republicans.

Before it’s too late.