Joe Simonson on January 9, 2018
It’s become fashionable among journalists and various politicos to discuss whether Democrats should attempt to remove President Donald Trump from office via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, supposedly because he has become too mentally incapacitated to fulfill his duties.
After his televised meeting with top House and Senate leaders from both parties, the liberal fantasy that they can simply nullify the results from the last presidential election — bolstered by the discredited accounts from Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” that made the president appear psychologically unstable — should no longer be entertained by the media any more than it already was.
No individual who is as mentally unstable or dangerously unfit could have possibly ran an hour-long negotiation and discussion over complex policy solutions as the president did Tuesday. Throughout the meeting, Trump not only seemed engaged and alert, but also served as a leader managing both parties’ desires.
Even an article in USA Today, whose editors wrote an editorial late last year titled “Will Trump’s Lows Ever Hit Rock Bottom?” called the meeting “extraordinary.” Sen. Lindsey Graham called the negotiations “the most fascinating meeting I’ve been involved with in 20-plus years in politics.”
The president’s performance Tuesday afternoon raises further questions about how a Yale psychiatrist deemed it appropriate to deliver a warning to a group of Democratic lawmakers that they should consider removing him from office.
Nor does the president’s clear sanity and mental fitness — regardless of whether or not one agrees with him on policy issues — jive with Wolff’s assertion that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a subject of regular conversation within the White House.
In an interview on “Meet The Press,” Wolff told Chuck Todd that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment — which allows the vice president to take power in cases where the president dies or becomes incapacitated — is “alive every day” in the West Wing.
On top of being grossly inappropriate, any effort by Democrats or anti-Trump Republicans to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment going forward will have to reconcile with the fact that millions of Americans have now seen Trump publicly performing the duties of the office more than competently.
Of course, there are those who won’t ever be happy. A Vox article ran last weekend arguing that Trump needed a psychological evaluation “by force if necessary.” The idea of essentially kidnapping a president because some tweets made a liberal writer uncomfortable was comically ridiculous before, but after today’s public meeting just seems like a pathetic attempt to kick a Republican out of office.
