Say hello to my little friend the 25th amendment

There’s a very non-trivial possibility that the following sequence of events happens:

(1) Donald Trump is elected president in November.

(2) At some point during his term, it becomes undeniable to all but the most blind cult members that his cognitive function, which seems to be in a fairly steep decline already, has deteriorated to the point where he has to be removed from office, even without any consideration at all of how his authoritarianism and criminality make him unfit for office in a political rather than a clinical sense.

What happens then? The formal legal answer is that a president in this condition is supposed to be removed by the mechanisms provided by the 25th amendment. Those are as follows:

(1) The president can of course resign the office permanently, or, per the 25th amendment, inform Congress that he’s temporarily unable to perform the duties of the office, at which point the vice president becomes the Acting President, until the president informs Congress that he can resume his duties. Obviously Trump isn’t going to do either of these things, so we move on to:

(2) The vice president can convince a majority of the Cabinet to sign a letter declaring that the president is unable to perform the duties of the office. At that point the vice president becomes the Acting President. If the president disputes this, Congress has 21 days to confirm, by a two-thirds vote in each chamber, that the vice president should remain Acting President (The Acting President has exactly the same powers as the president).

I assume various people in Trump’s orbit are keenly aware of this possibility, and that the vetting of Trump’s vice presidential candidate pick will be in large part focused on picking somebody who won’t “betray” his or her (I personally would bet on Kari Lake) Maximum Leader in this Deep State conspiratorial way.

But again, there’s a very real chance that we spend much of Trump’s second term trying to figure out if and when an attempt is made to remove Trump via this mechanism.

BTW I’m pretty confident that if Biden suffers serious cognitive slippage — always a real risk for someone in their mid-80s, although unlike Trump I see no evidence that this is currently happening — he will voluntarily resign when he recognizes this, or, if not, he will in fact be removed via the 25th amendment, since Democrats are not in the grip of an authoritarian cult of personality.

So as usual, the existing legal rules do in fact work as long as you apply them to Democrats.