Imagine your boss at work were to doze off in the middle of meetings, waking up just long enough to spew racist insults at an entire minority group (“garbage!”) before reconnecting with dreamland. Or was notorious for sliming women as “stupid” and “ugly” and “Piggy.” Well, that boss would be speedily kicked to the curb. (Although I doubt that anyone criminally convicted of 34 felonies would’ve been hired at all.)
But with respect to the most important job in America, a job currently held by someone so clueless about his own ill health he apparently has no idea why his docs keep ordering MRIs, it’s woefully tragic there are virtually no avenues for removal – except for impeachment (tried that twice, forget it), or, dare I bother to bring it up, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Ratified in 1967, the untested 25th says a vice president, working with a “majority of either the principle officers of the executive departments” – what we now call the Cabinet – “or of such body as Congress may by law provide,” can eject a president for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
In theory, given Trump’s dire medical and mental maladies, key people in power should be willing to confront our national emergency. Just for starters, they should acknowledge the obvious evidence of what mental health experts call “behavioral disinhibition,” which, in layman’s terms is, saying out loud the most insane stuff that lives in one’s head. The most common symptoms are “loss of manners/decorum” and “impulsive, tactless, or vulgar behavior.” Such as calling for the execution of one’s critics, “punishable by DEATH.” (Recent.) Or smearing all Somali immigrants as “garbage.” (Aforementioned.) Or lauding the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis. (Autumn ‘24.)
He reminds me of Walter Sobchak, the Dude’s corpulent sidekick in “The Big Lebowski.” Whenever Trump goes haywire, he brings to mind Walter’s impromptu rants and batty braggadocio, to wit: “You want a toe?! I can get you a toe, believe me! There are ways, Dude! You don’t want to know about it, believe me! I’ll get you a toe by this afternoon – with nail polish!”
In the words of Joyce Strong, a registered nurse who has evaluated the limited public mental and medical evidence, “Until Trump releases full medical records, including his medication list, toxicology results and independent cognitive evaluation, the country is left guessing about the health and fitness of the one officeholder with the power to hide it. And that is unacceptable and dangerous.”
But, alas, there are two roadblocks to action:
(1) The 25th Amendment doesn’t define unable or inability, nor does it offer any guidance on how to assess a president’s medical or mental impairments. The language is so flexible as to be almost meaningless. The loopholes are so massive that you could drive a Hummer right through them.
(2) It’s the vice president’s job to lead a removal effort, but the current veep would be roasted alive by the MAGA base if he were to make such a move. Plus, Congress is packed with MAGA-subsumed wimps who long ago donated their spines to science. Plus, the current Cabinet is nothing more than a trash heap of broken toys.
The good news is the mainstream media (I’m an alum) has finally begun to bestir itself enough to track Trump’s deterioration. Maybe most Americans won’t care about that coverage, given their general antipathy to the media. But what’s clear at year’s end is that millions of voters are jonesing to hold Trump accountable in the 2026 midterms by turning the House blue.
I doubt there’s a landslide majority for removing Trump on the basis of his medical and mental infirmities, but a landslide majority – 62 percent in a recent national poll – believes he and his MAGA allies have screwed up the economy and done squat about inflation. Most notably, he’s crashing among independents (25 percent support). And the tone-deaf elitist stuff he’s been saying lately (“affordability is the greatest con job by Democrats” and affordability “doesn’t mean anything”) should be grist for blue party ads from now til next November.
How sweet it would be to wax optimistic! But then I remember his mentally addled babble on the 2024 trail, like when he was asked whether he’d prioritize legislation to make child care affordable, and he answered this way, verbatim: “It’s a very important issue but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because, look, child care is child care is, child care couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it, in this country you have to have it.”
77 million voters were fine with that. Or paid no attention. Or simply didn’t care.
So until the midterm ballots are tallied, I’ll reserve judgment on whether we’ve reversed our mental decrepitude.
–
Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com