Column: We’re stuck with an unchecked mad king until January

Amid all the alarming and unhinged comments from the President of the United States in recent days threatening Iran with genocide – remarks going beyond even Donald Trump’s usual nonsense – it was a statement from his spokesperson on Tuesday that really put the madness of the White House into perspective.

“Only the president knows where things stand and what he is going to do”, Karoline Leavitt said.

She spoke these words just hours before Trump’s 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline for Iran to either reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping or face Armageddon, that is, war crimes committed by the United States. The White House press secretary’s statement was as clear a description as possible of governance under Trump these days: a mad king rules, virtually unchecked.

And as a practical matter, there is nothing under the Constitution, neither impeachment nor removal under the 25th Amendment, that can be done about him. Voters only have the option of ousting complicit Republican majorities in the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections, and installing Democratic — and Democratic — control over Trump for the remaining two years of his term.

We know now, just before Trump’s Iran deadline. warning “An entire civilization is going to die tonight,” he said. announcement a fragile two-week ceasefire for negotiations. The Commander-in-Chief declared victory, of course. But Iran too. And he got the argument right: Iran continued to control and monetize the passage through the strait, unlike before Trump’s war began on February 28, and already on Wednesday it exercised this power by close route in retaliation for Israeli strikes. The ceasefire also allows Iran to retain possession of its enriched, near-atomic-grade uranium, and the country won Trump’s offer for possible relief from tariffs and sanctions.

So much for “UNCONDITIONAL RENDER!” » he asked in a job a month ago.

I write these words on Wednesday. Who knows where things will be by the time you read this? “Only the president knows.”

Trump has fluctuated, reversed, and contradicted himself repeatedly — even in a single social media speech or a single jaw-dropping performance for the press — since he ordered war against Iran nearly six weeks ago, without informing Congress, much less authorizing it. Since Sunday, he has called Iran’s leaders “crazy bastards” and “animals” and taken credit for a “total regime change, where different, smarter and less radicalized minds predominate.”

Presidential government by fiat and whim would be wrong in any case, given the checks and balances on power provided by the Constitution, and particularly the war power. But in Trump’s case, America has a president who has recently accumulated evidence of his mental instability and unfitness for office.

And spare us the cheerleaders’ claims on Fox News on how he plays multidimensional chess. Anyway Alex Jones compares Trump to ‘Mad King Lear’ and calls for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from power – echoing former Trump promoters including Marjorie Taylor Greene And Candace Owensamong other things — you know he has crossed a line with his unilateral declarations of war and his profane threats (on Easter Sunday!) of genocidal apocalypse.

The evidence of Trump’s dangerous instability has been present since his political genesis. During his first term, he warned that he would unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against nuclear-armed North Korea, then declared that he had “fallen in love” with dictator Kim Jong-un (without achieving any reduction in Kim’s arsenal). He celebrates the death of political enemies and pursues those who are still alive. He interrupts several times on a political issue to talk about his ballroom plans.

He ordered armed agents into American neighborhoods during immigration raids, then expressed neither responsibility nor remorse when citizens died and legal residents were deported. National security officials in his first term have made it known that they stopped him from acting on his worst impulses, but there’s no chance that was from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Retired Gen. Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 2021 describe Trump in his first term as mentally declining and “fascist to the core.”

It would be hard to find anyone who thinks Trump has improved over the past five years.

The country “can’t be a therapy session for … a troubled man like this,” Trump’s first-term attorney general, William P. Barr, told CBS in 2023 as Trump campaigned to return to power.

If only the presidency was therapy for Trump. Instead, he’s like a power junkie who has the most powerful job in the world, mainly dealing with his intoxicants, and no one will stop him. Only people with extraordinary egos seek the White House in the first place, but when a true egomaniac inhabits this warped butter-top bubble, there is danger. I remain haunted by the words of retired General John F. Kelly, Trump’s first term Secretary of Homeland Security and then White House Chief of Staff, who in 2023 said of Trump’s potential re-election: “God help us.”

After twice failing to convict and remove Trump during his first term, Democrats have been reluctant to make a third attempt. until now. Many people in Congress have called for impeachment or invocation of the 25th amendment to oust him. There is some value in sending a message. But Democrats are giving false hope to their supporters. A Republican-led Congress and a Cabinet of clown courtiers will not exercise the powers they have, even against a mad king.

The authors of the Constitution, after overthrowing a king, debated at length how to protect themselves against a power-mad president. But they didn’t expect political parties to bring tribal loyalty to the country. This partisanship has made the high barriers to impeaching a president – ​​a two-thirds vote of the Senate for post-impeachment conviction, or, under the 25th Amendment, action by the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet – virtually insurmountable.

There remain voters who, during special elections and outside the year, no later than Tuesday have shown their zeal to punish Trump’s party. We can hope that a new Congress will control it next January.

And we can pray.

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