A Valentine to Jennifer Rubin, the most courageous commentator on our present reality

Sandy Levinson

I've suggested this before, but it's worth repeating that the two most truly admirable columnists in the country may well be Michael Gerson and Jennifer Rubin, both of them part of the ostensibly "conservative" cohort of columnists at the Washington Post.  They have been consistently and eloquently critical of our newly inaugurated president (who may or may not be a "sociopath," but is almost universally agreed to be otherwise unfit to be our president under any standard criteria, including previous experience, knowledge of relevant policy, and emotional maturality).  They have both become genuine heroes of mine, which means, among other things, that I will now read and take seriously even columns of theirs when I disagree with them (as when, say, Ms. Rubin attacks the Iran deal or expresses more support for the current Israeli position than I believe is merited).  They are both truly serious and commendable people, who are clearly willing to burn bridges to traditional friends and allies because of their own intellectual and moral integrity.  I've never met either, but it would be an honor to do so..Both deserve the award that the JFK library gives each year to those who are "profiles in courage" (an award, incidentally, that JFK would certainly never have won as a practicing politician). 

The gist of her column, provocatively titled "Maybe Trump is not lying," is that in fact he may not be "lying" in the sense of actually realizing that he is stating falsehoods.  Instead, he is truly delusionary, believing that what he is saying is "in fact" true, just in the way (my analogy, not hers) that a certain kind of schizophrenic claiming to hear voices from aliens contacting him/her from spaceships hovering above us in the ether may in fact be accurately conveying his/her perception of reality.  So who is worse, a mendacious clear-cut liar (think of Kelly Anne Conway, perhaps the single most loathesome person to emerge from the Trump entourage, even moreso than Steve Bannon, who probably does in fact believe some of his near-neo-Nazi pernicious nonsense) or a delusionary?   One might analyze this either as moral question or a policy question.  The former allows us to let the "sincere" schizophrenic off the hook for the reasons that we allow people to be acquitted on grounds of mental illness even as we immediately commit them to facilities not called "prisons" because they are in fact dangers to themselves or, more importantly, others.  The latter, on the other hand, requires us to ask which is in fact more of a truly danger as a would-be "leader."  (The answer, of course, may be that both are equal menaces.)  In any event, she concludes as follows:

We are not calling — yet — for invocation of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. (“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”)

 We are calling for someone, perhaps his children, to see if they can prevail upon him to stop behaving in this way, for if not, legitimate worries will mount about whether he is able to carry out his duties. We also are saying that Republicans need to be pressed to state their view: Is he lying or is he unable to separate what he wants to believe and what exists, literally, in front of his eyes? The first makes him morally unfit, and was the basis upon which many #NeverTrumpers refused to vote for him. If the latter, they — and we all — have a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have never seen. With Trump, however, we have learned the past provides no guarantees

So she is willing to suggest what others have been too tactful (or gutless) to note:  That we don't have to talk about impeachment, which requires wading into the swamp of legalistic arguments about what constitutes a "high crime and misdemeanor."  We're already beginning to be subjected to endless debate about the one true meaning of the Emoluments Clause, which, frankly, I regard as exemplifying the kind of bubble of abstracted legalism that smart and well-trained lawyers live in.  Within a seminar room, it may be worth arguing whether the Emoluments Clause does or does not apply to the President because he is not an "officer" under a certain tendentious reading of 18th century literature.  Among other things, of course, this requires putting to one side that it is almost literally bizarre to assume that those who cared enough about foreign influence to put the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution in the first place would have thought that it should be perfectly all right for foreigners in effect to try to bribe a sitting president.  But I truly digress, for what makes Donald Trump so truly scary to almost any thoughtful individual (including, I have discovered, at least one of my colleagues at the University of Texas who in fact voted for him) is his emotional volatility.  (I should note, incidentally, that another colleague of mine, a trained physician, has suggested that Mr. Trump is exhibiting some symptions of early-onset dementia--which wouldn't be all that early given that he is, after all, 70.

The 25th Amendment, if one in fact takes it seriously as part of the Constitution, does offer a way to get rid of Mr. Trump tomorrow without having to submit to Talmudic debates about the particular extent to which he has committed "high crimes or misdemeanors."  To be sure, other kinds of debates are generated by the 25th Amendment, but, blessedly, none of them require getting into the swamp of originalism and the like.  One "merely" has to figure out how to discern whether or not a President has become unfit to carry out the responsibilities of his/her office.

Even if, as a practical matter, it is unimaginable that the 25th Amendment will in fact be invoked (any more than it was invoked in Reagan's second term, when one suspects that some of the inner circle were aware that Alzheimer's has set in), we we should ask ourselves exactly why it is unimaginable.  As she suggests, there is a perfectly good argument that he lacks the emotional stability to carry out the solemn duties of his office.  Is this proof that the 25th Amendment, added to the Constitution only after John F. Kennedy's assassination and the realization that we would have been far worse off had he lived  and lingered as a severely injured President, perhaps like Woodrow Wilson, is exactly what James Madison thought was true about lots of the Constitution--that is, that the relevant clauses were simply "parchment barriers," not to be taken really seriously.

It would be a very good thing if the press, every time it interrogated Vice President Pence and other members of the Cabinet, asked if they were aware of the Amendment and if they had any personal concerns about Mr. Trump's actual abilities carry out his office.  Do they really believe it is irrelevant what a President believes to be the case about the world, whether it's space aliens from Venus, the non-existence of global warming, the presence or electoral fraud, or whatever?  I assume that they do not share the same delusions that Mr. Trump does, which means they are, like Ms.Conway, only mendacious enablers who deserve the unalloyed contempt of the country in a way that a pathetically deluded schizophrenic does not.  Perhaps Donald Trump indeed has the excuse of being seriously mentally ill.  There is no excuse for his entourage of enablement, including people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.  .  

Posted 3:38 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]