25th Amendment Time for Mad King Donald

[Celerity]

Today on TAP: His narcissism has become psychotically megalomaniacal.

https://prospect.org/2026/01/20/25th-amendment-time-mad-king-donald/


President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, January 16, 2026. Credit: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo

Act I, Scene 1, of King Lear not only introduces us to the aging monarch, but makes clear that he’s lost his marbles. Rather than subject a hugely important strategic decision—the coming division of his kingdom—to rational calculation, he instead requires his pending successors (his daughters) to tell him how much they love him. The sheer volume of their professed adoration—the more over the top, the better—becomes the sole criterion by which he makes policy. It’s the kind of scene we Americans hadn’t seen enacted very often in our own high governmental circles until Donald Trump’s second term as president, when he chose it as the model for his cabinet meetings, which consist of his secretaries telling him how great he is.

In Shakespeare’s version, Lear, at least, has one councilor, Kent, who persists in telling him, on pain of banishment, that he’s making a huge mistake. No such councilor can be found in Trump’s circle, or in the Republican congressional caucuses, or, for that matter, in many major American institutions. Corporations, banks, white-shoe law firms, and numerous universities have prostrated themselves before Trump. While elites have disgraced themselves, it’s fallen to the people to take to the streets in opposition. During the 2024 presidential race, it was Joe Biden’s mental acuity that became, very understandably, the object of public concern. Trump’s mental and psychological condition was widely understood to be a little off-kilter, but the conventional wisdom was that, well, that was just Trump being Trump.



Today, which marks the first anniversary of Trump’s reassuming the duties of the presidency, it’s clear that the conventional wisdom was profoundly and disastrously wrong. Age, narcissism, and megalomania now determine Trump’s actions and, alarmingly, the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. When the consequences are confined to his ordering up monuments to his assumed greatness—stamping his face on coins, engraving his name on government buildings, sizing his ballroom to dwarf anything else in D.C.—they can be dismissed as relatively harmless outbursts of ridiculously overindulged self-love. But when, as he told The New York Times earlier this month, he views the only constraints on his actions to be his own sense of propriety and morality, rather than the Constitution that presidents are sworn to preserve, protect, and defend, then we’ve been shuttled into a different form of government than the one we’ve assumed we’ve lived in for the past 250 years: a monarchy, at least as Trump himself sees it.

And now, like George III, against whom our Founders revolted, Trump is displaying symptoms of madness. His text to Norway’s prime minister, citing his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize as a reason he wants to seize Greenland, is in the grand tradition of mad old kings making immense policy decisions based on megalomania and whim. Just believing that he was in any sense qualified for the prize should itself have been evidence enough of his derangement. After a long life of proclaiming his fictions to be fact, and of indifference to the difference between the two, he may actually believe the lies that his fearful stooges tell him about himself. He surely feels wounded when anyone dares to tell him the truth about himself, as the Nobel Peace Prize committee unknowingly did when they gave the award to somebody else.

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[orangecrush]

1. Ain't gonna happen

He was able to spew race hate and lies for over 100 minutes today.

He's exactly what the GOP wants.

There is no "big thing" that's going to depose him.

The results of his policy are, imo, the only thing that will do that.

That is going to take some time.

The shit is still flying towards the fan.

Get ready.

[Bread and Circuses]

2. 25th Amendment ! NOPE .

25th Amendment ! NOPE . Who's going to drag him out of the Oval Office ?????
He’s not leaving.
US is past a peaceful solution to end the fascist coup by seditious traitors.

Do you really think the Republican fascist crime syndicate is going to walk away from a global protection racket ?

NOPE.

[yellow dahlia]

3. Bookmarking, for later. F meter on overload.

[malaise]

4. THIS

[leftstreet]

5. DURec