6 - Trump’s Medicine

Summary

Some people think that Donald Trump is crazy. Many of them live in Washington, DC. When consulting the Lexis-Nexis database of news coverage, for example, one finds 329 uses of the collocate <Trump + 25th Amendment> during the first three months of the Trump presidency. Between July 1st and September 30th, 2018, however, that same pairing jumped to 3,833 hits. “Members of Congress ‘Holding Secret Conversations about Removing Donald Trump from Office,’” blared the Independent, quoting such quotables as Bill Kristol, who declared that the chance of removing the President was “somewhere in the big middle ground between a 1 per cent and 50. It’s some per cent. It’s not nothing,” thus providing a valuable lesson in both politics and basic mathematics. The Independent also relied on Harvard’s Laurence Tribe (“invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is no fantasy but an entirely plausible tool”), gladdening the hearts of many Americans in the process.¹