What happens if Trump is too addled to president even putatively?
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I took a close look at the 25th amendment back at the very end of the first Trump presidency, and whoa Nellie (a cruising yawl).
The 25th amendment was adopted in the wake of the JFK assassination, since it occurred to some civic-minded people that the Constitution had no mechanism for dealing with a situation in which the president had been severely or completely incapacitated by a physical or mental health crisis, natural or otherwise as Johnny Ola might say, but was not actually dead yet.
The most straightforward situation of this type would be if the president has a massive stroke and is in a coma or otherwise very clearly can’t function at all. The 25th’s mechanism for this was supposed to be equally straightforward: The VP gets the majority of the cabinet to sign a letter announcing that the VP is Acting President, and the VP becomes Acting President automatically at that point, unless the president challenges this. If the president challenges this, which obviously wouldn’t happen if he’s in a coma or similar, then Congress can keep the VP as Acting President if it votes within 21 days by a two-thirds majority in both houses to maintain the post-cabinet letter status quo. If it doesn’t do that then the president goes back to being the president.
The congressional voting provisions were designed to deal with the much trickier gray zone possibilities, where a president is too impaired to do the job any more, but, unlike the coma scenario, is still cogent enough to challenge this judgment. Let’s call this the Demented Grandpa scenario, which I realize is a crazy desert island hypothetical that could never actually happen, but still.
The bad news is that if the president’s party is in the grip of a quasi-messianic cult of personality, the 25th amendment’s mechanisms just aren’t going to work. First you need more than half the cabinet to sign off, and note that Demented Grandpa retains the right to fire any or all of them for any or no reason at any moment, so this kind of bureaucratic coup would be very difficult to pull off as a practical matter.
An even bigger problem is that even if Vice President My Mom Traded Me For 30 Percocet And Really Can You Blame Her could somehow pull that off, you need two-thirds of EACH house of Congress to sign off on this, which means that barely more than half the GOP cultists in the House could block this all by themselves.
So yeah that’s not happening.
I’ve always argued that the problem with an 80something president is not that he would drop dead. The problem is that we don’t have rules that can deal with Demented Grandpa president unless the president’s party is the hands of people who are both rational and public-spirited, so that’s a .000 batting average at the moment and for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile:
President Trump has not been seen for three days, raising fresh questions about Biden’s health.