In other words, to remove the president using the impeachment process, the forces of sanity would need to muster a two-thirds majority in the Senate. To remove the president under the 25th Amendment, they would need to do it in both houses.

Don’t kid yourself, folks: There is no magic bullet here. There is no constitutional magic bullet. There is no investigative or prosecutorial magic bullet—no Robert Mueller or Jack Smith. There is no combination of protests and elections or lobbying that can make this problem go away quickly.

There is, instead, a long hard slog ahead of us—a long hard slog of elections, advocacy, protest, litigation, and people fighting for their rights.

And there is a long hard slog ahead of Europe too in handling the disaster the United States has unleashed on the world. Because that is what managing a deranged person is like.

… This was long before George Conway wrote his famous Atlantic article about Trump’s malignant narcissism. Trump’s mental health was not a subject it was considered appropriate to discuss—at least not in a serious way, and I’m not a clinician, and Lawfare is not a medical or psychological journal. And yet, even then—eight months before he was elected the first time—there was “the small matter of Trump’s—there’s no polite way to say this—evident clinical symptoms. I’m not a psychologist qualified to make a diagnosis, but it simply has to be significant that it’s hard to have a serious conversation about Trump without using words like egomania, grandiosity, or narcissism.”

There was no escaping it. He was deranged—grandiose, egomaniacal, narcissistic, the sort of man who would get obsessed with acquiring Greenland and blow up America’s most sacred international commitments to get it done. The sort of man who would respond to not getting the Nobel Peace Prize by declaring he was no longer solely interested in peace. The sort of man who would take the medal from its rightful winner and feel no shame at the theft.