Unfit to Govern: We Need a 25th Amendment for the American Police State
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
One week after posting a profanity-laced Easter message threatening to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, Donald J. Trump, the 47th president of the United States, spent the night of April 12 and into the early morning hours unleashing a barrage of AI-generated images, threats and insults.
One post depicted Trump as Jesus, imbued with divine power, healing the sick.
Another imagined a Trump-branded hotel on the Moon.
Yet another lashed out at Pope Leo XIV as weak on crime, suggesting he owed his papacy to Trump and “should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”
After significant outcry—including from his own evangelical and MAGA supporters—Trump deleted the post but refused to apologize for it.
Blasphemous. Profane. Threatening. Self-aggrandizing.
These posts are not anomalies.
They are part of a pattern—one that appears to be escalating.
What was once dismissed as erratic now feels increasingly unhinged. What was once provocative now borders on delusional. What was once ego now approaches outright megalomania.
This is not normal.
Nor is it merely rhetorical excess.
It is behavior that mirrors the governing style: impulsive, self-serving, detached from reality, and increasingly dangerous.
The same egomania driving Trump’s online persona is shaping his presidency.
He has alienated allies, threatened the sovereignty of other nations—including Canada, Greenland and Cuba—and pushed the country toward ill-advised wars with devastating human and financial costs.
Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, he has overseen policies that have left average Americans struggling to stay afloat, even as his allies and corporate partners grow richer.
Whether driven by ego or manipulation—by flattery, spectacle or greed—the result is the same: America is being hollowed out while the president redecorates it in gold.
Literally.
He is even staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn on his 80th birthday as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations.
All of this while Americans struggle with rising grocery costs, unaffordable healthcare, and economic instability driven by his reckless policy decisions.
This is not serious governance. This is spectacle.
This is not rational.
This is not presidential.
And yet, despite widespread fatigue, desensitization, and normalization of this behavior, there must come a point when we acknowledge what is plainly visible: something is deeply wrong with the president.
This is no longer a matter of partisan disagreement or political style.
To any objective viewer, Donald Trump’s behavior—which has always been erratic at best—has become increasingly unstable.
As the New York Times reports, “Trump seems even less restrained and more incoherent at times. He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact.”
As the oldest person elected to the White House, Trump—who turns 80 this year—oscillates between vicious politicking, relentless self-idolatry, and serving as the sleight-of-hand prop for what increasingly resembles an organized crime operation—one that operates behind the floodlights to consolidate power and wealth while robbing the American electorate blind.
Trump’s self-mythologizing is unprecedented in modern American politics.
As journalist Peter Baker notes, Trump “regularly depicts himself in a heroic, almost godly fashion, as a monarch, as a Superman, as a Jedi knight, as a military hero, even as a pope in a white cassock.” Trump even toyed with the idea of renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Trump.
This is not branding.
It is the architecture of a cult of personality.
Cults of personality are hallmarks of authoritarian regimes—not constitutional republics. They are associated with figures like Stalin, Mao, Mussolini and, more recently, Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s personality cult has, as the New York Times Editorial Board noted, “transformed the Republican Party from a political organization into a cult of personality”—one that reinforces and amplifies his excesses.
We are, as Pope Leo XIV warned, mired in a “delusion of omnipotence” that “is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.”
Which brings us to the unavoidable question: what happens when the president appears unable to discharge the duties of his office in a rational, coherent, and responsible manner?
In other words, what can we do when the president appears to be losing his mind?
The Constitution provides a remedy.
The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a process by which the government continues to function should the president be unable to carry out his duties.
A growing chorus of individuals have loudly called to invoke the 25th Amendment, insisting that the president is not fit for office.
The same voices that once called for invoking the 25th Amendment against Joe Biden have fallen silent—or worse, attempted to dismiss Trump’s instability as authentic and refreshingly unfiltered.
But there is no filter for this level of dysfunction.
Yet again, the troubling parallels to America’s nascent beginnings are hard to ignore.
King George III—believed to have suffered from severe mental instability, including manic episodes and delusions—lost the American colonies in part because of his inability to govern rationally.
Two hundred fifty years later, America once again finds itself charting dangerous territory.
Yet even so, this moment is about so much more than one man and his cult of personality.
Because while the president may be unraveling in plain sight, the machinery of the American Police State continues to expand—quietly, relentlessly, and with bipartisan support.
Surveillance is expanding.
Policing is becoming more militarized.
Power is becoming more centralized and less accountable.
And unlike the presidency, there is no 25th Amendment for the police state.
No mechanism to declare it unfit.
No procedure to remove it.
Or is there?
After all, isn’t that what the Declaration of Independence was—a formal recognition that a ruler was no longer fit to govern, followed by a blueprint for replacing that power with something accountable to the people?
The American Revolution was, at its core, a judgment: that unchecked power must be resisted.
That principle still stands.
As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the answer is not violence, but vigilance.
Not chaos, but constitutional resistance.
If the government has become unfit—whether through madness, corruption or unchecked power—then it is up to “we the people” to hold it accountable.
Because if we fail to act, we may soon find that the problem is no longer one unstable leader—but a system that no longer answers to the people at all.
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