I’m not proud, dear reader, to be trafficking in #Resistance porn. Unfortunately, times have been tough, and my magnum opus marrying socialism, liberalism, conservatism, and populism with the best of Eastern and Western philosophy has, like Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue, failed to win backing from Qatari investors. Like any businessman, I therefore turn to smut, which means Trump impeachment fantasies. Or to be precise, I shall speculate about the ouster of Donald Trump by means of the 25th Amendment. What would make his ouster legitimate—enough so that even his supporters would assent to it?

Before we get to the dirty stuff, let me first offer some hypocritical, but sincere, disavowals. For the moment, ousting Trump by any means other than that of the ballot box would be terrible for the country. Preserving our democracy requires a minimum of good sportsmanship, meaning that if you lose, you don’t just cancel the game. We can pretend that James Comey and Vladimir Putin were the primary causes of Trump’s victory, causing Hillary Clinton to pour vast sums into TV ads in Nebraska instead of Wisconsin or Michigan. We can hate the electoral college. But then we move on. Trump won by the rules.

Second, Trump is still making people hysterical. Compared to his two predecessors, he has achieved very little, and most of his concrete policies have been standard-issue Republican. Mike Pence or Marco Rubio would also have tried to repeal or undermine Obamacare and roll back environmental regulations and escalate tension with Iran. (A profile of Pence by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer supports the idea that Pence would be much more effective at advancing a movement agenda.) Deportations aren’t spiking, and very few of them involve people arrested out of the blue (as opposed to people who were ignoring existing court orders of removal). Freedom of expression is threatened far more by tech monopolies and growing illiberalism in the academy than by Trump’s dumb jabs. Businesses are doing fine.

And yet. It’s probable by now that most Americans have indulged at least a daydream or two of Trump leaving office early. When he’s been especially bad, I’ve done so myself, frankly. Trump has failed to do most of the good things he was going to do and succeeded in doing a lot of the bad things he wasn’t going to do. If you were hoping for a president who would work toward a more self-contained, less imperial America, with wiser immigration policy and less dogma on trade, then you haven’t much to be happy about. Maybe better just to have Pence, who at least knows how to behave at weddings and funerals.

More important, everyone is worried, to varying degrees, that the president is losing his marbles. “He’s lost a step,” one White House adviser told my Vanity Fair colleague Gabriel Sherman, in just one of many quotes in a story that caused ripples around the world. Aides are keeping the president away from television interviews. Longtime friend Thomas Barrack has told The Washington Post that he has been “stunned” by Trump’s outbursts and said, “he’s better than this.” Senator Bob Corker has worried aloud that Trump is setting us “on the path to World War III.” As Peggy Noonan summed things up last week, “A lot of people appear to be questioning in a new way, or at least talking about, the president’s judgment, maturity and emotional solidity.”