1. United States
2. Va.
3. Letter

Earlier this week, Trump spoke for nearly two and a half hours in a press room—rambling, incoherent, unmoored. This follows last week, when he stood up in the middle of a meeting with petroleum executives, wandered to a window, and began musing aloud about a building that does not exist. He writes, in the middle of the night, to the Prime Minister of Norway, apparently confusing it with Denmark, and says, in effect, “since you didn’t give me the Peace Prize, now I’m going to engage in war over Greenland.” What’s worse than the President’s behavior is the behaviors surrounding it. The press courts the spectacle, then feigns shock. Congress performs helplessness. And the 25th Amendment is mentioned—something to gesture at so no one has to do anything. Let’s be clear. The 25th Amendment does not apply here. It is not a political removal mechanism. It is not a remedy for authoritarian behavior. It is not a substitute for congressional courage. The 25th Amendment is a cabinet-driven incapacity clause. It presumes a functioning executive branch acting in good faith to address physical or cognitive incapacity. It presumes independent actors. It presumes sanity upstream. It presumes that every person on the Cabinet isn’t a sycophantic stooge who appears as mentally incapacitated as the President himself. None of those conditions exist. Invoking the 25th in this context is not naïve—it is *evasive.* It externalizes responsibility. It allows you, my representative in congress, to pretend removal is someone else’s job. It reframes a constitutional crisis as a medical one. There is only one mechanism for removing a president who is abusing power, destabilizing the state, or acting in ways that endanger the republic: Impeachment and removal. That’s it. No workaround. No shortcut. No comforting fiction. Every time a member of Congress talks about the 25th Amendment instead of impeachment, what they are really saying is this: we don’t want ownership. Impeachment requires recorded votes. It forces alignment. It creates a historical record. It assigns responsibility that cannot later be laundered through concern-trolling and hindsight regret. The 25th Amendment, by contrast, is risk-free theater. At some point, constitutional systems face a “seriousness test.” Not a legal test. Not a rhetorical one. A practical one. The question is simple: when the tools designed to stop abuse of power carry real political cost, are they used — or are they talked around? Invoking the 25th Amendment is what institutions do when they want to appear alarmed without acting. Impeachment is what they do when they are willing to accept consequences. This is the line between governance and theater. And once it is crossed, it does not quietly uncross itself. History will not say, “At least they were worried.” It will say: they had the authority—and refused to exercise it. This is the part modern commentary avoids. Catastrophes are rarely caused by madmen alone. They are enabled by institutions that decide, collectively, that action is someone else’s job. This is YOUR job. Your job to rally your colleagues. Your job to get enough house reps to sign on. Your job to vote to remove. Whether the president is diminished is not the question. I believe he is. But even if he’s not, then the situation is even more dire. The President is deliberately placing all the systems that America has relied on for its safety, security, and prosperity at risk. And if he’s not insane, then it is a deliberate act of malice, not stupidity, and not incapacity. So, whether you think the President is insane or a malicious actor, the question becomes why the people empowered to stop him from harming the United States keep pretending they aren’t.