Over the weekend, the topic of the president*'s sanity became almost as hot a topic as whether or not White House aide Stephen Miller is actually a replicant from Ceti Alpha 12. Why they trotted this guy out in public remains a mystery. I remember him as being the most feral of Trump's warmup acts out on the stump. I thought they'd stash him in a steamer trunk once they got to the White House.

However, Miller dropped in across the platforms of all the Sunday Showz, appeared to be reading his responses off of cue cards held up off camera by a waiter from Mar-a-Lago, and generally represented the current administration as a collection of cosplaying authoritarian yahoos who just blew in from an appearance at PinochetFest at the Heritage Foundation. One example from Face The Nation will suffice:

Well, I think that it's been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government. One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is -- is -- is beyond anything we've ever seen before. The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

Why, oh, why do they laugh at his mighty sword?

If you had a president slipping into megalomania, Miller is exactly the wrong kind of sycophant with which to surround him. And the possibility that the presidential trolley has left whatever tracks it had in the first place seems to be talked about more openly. If Senator Al Franken is to be believed, even Republican senators are wondering about this. According to Franken, the president*, these anonymous Republicans believe is "not right, mentally. And then, some are harsher. I haven't heard a lot of good things and I've heard great concern about his temperament."

(Andrew Sullivan has staged one of his patented dramatic-if-reluctant returns to the arena on this topic, after first making sure that we know that what he's writing is neither blog nor column, but something special in its essential Andrewness. He told Brian Stelter of CNN that, he "wished he didn't have to write" that he thought Trump was eight bulbs shy of a chandelier. Yeah, whatever, dude.)

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If we're going to talk about this, let's talk about it. Absent overwhelming political pressure that makes him feel as though he has no other choice, something to which the current president* seems uniquely immune, there's no way to rid ourselves of a crazy president except through the clumsy mechanisms of either impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Given the nature of Congress right now, in which a supine Republican majority is giving the White House everything it wants, it's hard to imagine a kind of mass mutiny that puts Mike Pence into the Oval Office, which is, of itself, a slightly smaller bag of horrors.

The only people with the actual power to rein in this president*, or to spare the country from further damage, are the Republicans in the Congress and, outside of a few tweets from Ben Sasse, and the perennial grumbling of John McCain, they're not ready to do that, at least not until they get their tax cuts through. Right now, if Trump were to show up on the Senate floor dressed like Julius Caesar and playing showtunes on the kazoo, Susan Collins might have second thoughts about handing the EPA over to Scott Pruitt, but that would be the extent of the Republican resistance.

The currently outraged sensibilities of Andrew Sullivan notwithstanding, the Republicans declared party-over-country a long time ago. If you're just noticing now, you haven't been paying attention.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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