25th Amendment Time for Mad King Donald
Act I, Scene 1, of King Lear not only introduces us to the aging monarch, but makes clear that he’s lost his marbles. Rather than subject a hugely important strategic decision—the coming division of his kingdom—to rational calculation, he instead requires his pending successors (his daughters) to tell him how much they love him. The sheer volume of their professed adoration—the more over the top, the better—becomes the sole criterion by which he makes policy. It’s the kind of scene we Americans hadn’t seen enacted very often in our own high governmental circles until Donald Trump’s second term as president, when he chose it as the model for his cabinet meetings, which consist of his secretaries telling him how great he is.
In Shakespeare’s version, Lear, at least, has one councilor, Kent, who persists in telling him, on pain of banishment, that he’s making a huge mistake. No such councilor can be found in Trump’s circle, or in the Republican congressional caucuses, or, for that matter, in many major American institutions. Corporations, banks, white-shoe law firms, and numerous universities have prostrated themselves before Trump. While elites have disgraced themselves, it’s fallen to the people to take to the streets in opposition.
During the 2024 presidential race, it was Joe Biden’s mental acuity that became, very understandably, the object of public concern. Trump’s mental and psychological condition was widely understood to be a little off-kilter, but the conventional wisdom was that, well, that was just Trump being Trump.
Age, narcissism, and megalomania now determine Trump’s actions and, alarmingly, the domestic and foreign policy of the United States.
Today, which marks the first anniversary of Trump’s reassuming the duties of the presidency, it’s clear that the conventional wisdom was profoundly and disastrously wrong. Age, narcissism, and megalomania now determine Trump’s actions and, alarmingly, the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. When the consequences are confined to his ordering up monuments to his assumed greatness—stamping his face on coins, engraving his name on government buildings, sizing his ballroom to dwarf anything else in D.C.—they can be dismissed as relatively harmless outbursts of ridiculously overindulged self-love.
But when, as he told The New York Times earlier this month, he views the only constraints on his actions to be his own sense of propriety and morality, rather than the Constitution that presidents are sworn to preserve, protect, and defend, then we’ve been shuttled into a different form of government than the one we’ve assumed we’ve lived in for the past 250 years: a monarchy, at least as Trump himself sees it.
And now, like George III, against whom our Founders revolted, Trump is displaying symptoms of madness. His text to Norway’s prime minister, citing his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize as a reason he wants to seize Greenland, is in the grand tradition of mad old kings making immense policy decisions based on megalomania and whim. Just believing that he was in any sense qualified for the prize should itself have been evidence enough of his derangement. After a long life of proclaiming his fictions to be fact, and of indifference to the difference between the two, he may actually believe the lies that his fearful stooges tell him about himself. He surely feels wounded when anyone dares to tell him the truth about himself, as the Nobel Peace Prize committee unknowingly did when they gave the award to somebody else.
But his determination to seize Greenland—already disgraceful, deplorable, and altogether addled even before his Nobel deprivation message—has become proof positive of his narcissistic megalomania, now that he’s linked his determination to his wounded ego. In Duck Soup, Fredonian President Rufus T. Firefly (played by Groucho Marx) takes his country to war because he imagines that the ambassador of a neighboring country has insulted him, but Duck Soup is an absurdist comedy (and a great one, at that).
Breaking up NATO on Rufus T. Firefly grounds might not be impeachable, though Trump’s violations of the Constitution surely are. But they are clearly grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment to our Constitution to replace him. Section 4 of the amendment begins:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Should the president contest his ousting, the amendment further states, it then requires Congress to decide the question.
I have no illusions that JD Vance and the rest of Trump’s cabinet would ever proclaim that their emperor has no clothes, or that the Republican Congress would do the same. I have no illusions that JD Vance would be even remotely a decent American president, as he has shown himself to be as avid a promoter of neofascist policies as Trump himself—in his case, more by reasons of ideology than, as is the case with Trump, psychology. But we’ve reached a moment in which even his substitution for Trump might offer a smidgen of relief.
It won’t happen, of course. Like George III, Trump has passed into madness. The parallels with the real 1776 grow stronger by the day.
The post 25th Amendment Time for Mad King Donald appeared first on The American Prospect.