In just over a week, Donald Trump has threatened to wipe out Iranian civilisation, picked a fight with the Pope and posted an image of himself healing the sick as Jesus Christ.
Questions about the US president’s mental state have dogged him since his first term, when he insisted he was a “very stable genius”. But now former allies from his Maga movement have turned on him and claim the president has gone insane.
It has prompted a renewed debate about invoking the 25th Amendment, the only constitutional means of ousting a sitting president.
Mr Trump is safe in the White House. Constitutional and political hurdles make forcing him out a virtual impossibility. Still, that has not stopped prominent figures from floating the possibility.
Many doctors publicly opined on the president’s mental state in his first term, but for the most part he was able to keep his Maga movement in check as a kind of praetorian guard.
That was then. Now members who made up that Maga coalition are publicly talking about the madness of Mr Trump.
Before publicly falling out with the president and resigning from Congress in January, Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of the loudest Maga voices in Washington.
Just over a year ago, she was wearing a cap that declared Mr Trump was “right about everything”. Last week, she claimed he was was not even right in the head, demanding the 25th Amendment be invoked after his threat to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.
“How can any person that is mentally stable call for an entire civilisation of people to be murdered?” she told CNN. “That’s not tough rhetoric. It’s insanity.”
Asked why she supported removing Mr Trump from office using the amendment, Ms Greene said: “I know it’s a very difficult, hard stretch to see it actually coming through. But the conversation needs to be had.”
“I’m sick of this s—,” said Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, on her radio show after Mr Trump posted a social media post threatening that an “an entire civilisation will die tonight” ahead of his deadline for Iran to agree to a peace deal. “Can’t he just behave like a normal human?”
ucker Carlson, another Maga acolyte who has fallen out of favour with Mr Trump, recently called on administration officials to defy the president if he asked them to strike Iranian civilians and suggested he would launch a nuclear strike on Tehran.
In fairness to the president, he is known for threatening “fire and fury” before stepping back at the last minute – in his trade wars as well as his actual wars.
His rhetoric was extreme, but it could have been a calculated negotiating tactic. Richard Nixon was another president who made use of what he called the “Madman Theory” in peace talks with the North Vietnamese.
And while Mr Trump’s recent behaviour has been erratic, he has toned down his criticisms of the “weak” and “terrible” Pope, suggesting on Thursday they could agree to disagree.
As for the AI-generated picture he posted on social media of himself as Jesus Christ, in red and white flowing robes, he claimed – albeit unconvincingly – that he thought it showed him as a doctor.
y Cobb, the former Trump White House attorney, believes the president is “clearly insane”. On the other hand, he told journalist Jim Acosta the cabinet is unlikely to invoke the 25th Amendment.
The issue for those who believe Mr Trump is a madman with his hand on the nuclear button is that the 25th Amendment is deliberately hard to invoke in its entirety.
In theory, it means an incapacitated president can hand over the keys to the Oval Office. It was adopted in 1967 following the assassination of John F Kennedy. What would have happened if Mr Kennedy had survived, but was left in a coma?
If the president wants to stay put, the other option is for the cabinet and the vice-president to force him from office.
This is “the hard way”, according to Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who drafted the documents which would have stripped power from Ronald Reagan if he was incapacitated.
Even if the vice-president and cabinet secretaries say the president is not fit to serve, the president can challenge this. Congress would then be asked to decide, with a two thirds majority needed in both the House and Senate for the president to be ousted.
“So the hard way is kind of multiply hard,” Mr Sunstein said. “The imperative of national stability and not overturning elections through monkey business, that’s always top of mind.”
When Reagan was shot and word began to spread in Washington that his condition was worse than publicly reported, Mr Sunstein, a 20-something lawyer at the justice department, drafted letters for the president, vice-president and cabinet secretaries to sign for a transfer of power.
“I remember this as if it were yesterday,” he said. “The time when I kind of got chills down my spine was typing all the names and I thought, ‘My God this is history’.”
Constitutional hurdles are one thing, but political calculus is another.