Stop trying to diagnose our 'very stable genius' president. He might be right. The 25th Amendment was never intended to be a coup mechanism. It was put in place for times when a president was legitimately, unambiguously disabled.

James S. Robbins | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Trump tweets he's 'like, really smart' On Saturday, President Donald Trump responded to questions about his mental capacity and fitness by calling himself “like, really smart” and saying that he is “a very stable genius”

Michael Wolff’s new semifictional book about the Trump White House has sparked a renewed wave of overwrought speculation about the president’s mental fitness. Not one to shy away from a fight, President Trump punched back that not only is he a successful chief executive, he's a “very stable genius” to boot. Dilbert creator Scott Adams took the matter a step further by arguing that proclaiming himself a “very stable genius” or “VSG” was itself a genius Trump move because that will be his “forever name.” Whether people use the expression VSG admiringly or sarcastically, the words “Trump” and “genius” are going to be kept in close proximity.

Diagnosing the president is something of a cottage industry among liberals and has been since before the election. Some medical professionals seem willing to ignore codes of conduct such as the American Psychiatric Association's “Goldwater Rule,” named for a previous Republican politician liberals thought was unfit to serve, that forbid drawing conclusions about the mental fitness of people they have never examined.

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Yale psychologist Bandy Lee suggests what might be needed is an intervention of the sort where “we contain the person, we remove them from access to weapons, and we do an urgent evaluation ... even against their will.” However Lee, who edited a collection of essays entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, acknowledges that this “will really look like a coup, and while we are trying to prevent violence, we don’t wish to incite it through, say, an insurrection.” Even so, she noted that Democratic members of Congress with whom she has met were “already convinced of the dangerousness of the president and the need for an evaluation.”

Behind all this speculation about Trump’s fitness for office lurks the 25th Amendment, which Wolff claims is “alive every day” at the White House. Trump critics have long fantasized about invoking the little-used amendment to remove him from office, but it is not so easy.

By the amendment’s terms, if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet determine the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the vice president immediately becomes acting president. Simple, no?

Well, no, because if the president objects to his ouster, he resumes his office. But if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet intervene once again, the whole mess is thrown to Congress, where both houses must vote by two-thirds to remove the president, or he stays.

This amendment was never intended to be a coup mechanism. It was put in place for circumstances where a president was legitimately, unambiguously disabled. Not only would such a plot create a genuine constitutional crisis that would undermine public order, and perhaps spark a civil war, it is politically foolish. If the president were in such dire political straits that he was apt to lose two-thirds votes in both houses of Congress, it would be much easier simply to impeach him, which only requires a majority vote on the House side.

There is no incentive for a vice president to depose the chief executive using the 25th Amendment when he could just let Congress do the dirty work. And in any case, Vice President Pence would never play Brutus in this ridiculous subversion.

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Being called unfit for duty puts Trump in good company, not only with Barry Goldwater but also Ronald Reagan. Detroit Mayor Coleman Young called the Gipper “crazy, trigger-happy and dangerous,” which pretty much summed up the left-wing critique. Books by disgruntled Reagan administration insiders such as David Stockman, Michael Deaver and Donald Regan also took the president to task for his alleged lack of mental fitness.But Reagan was an outsider who had come to shake up the establishment and restore American greatness, which he did.

The same is true of Donald Trump. He came to politics a novice, prevailed over the best and brightest in both party establishments, and won a race the smart set said he was certain to lose. The presidency was his entry-level job. Since then, he has presided over a booming economy, obliterated ISIS, cut taxes and regulations, reduced unemployment, boosted the stock market, and sent consumer confidence to a 17-year high.

Is that crazy? Sounds like what happens when you elect a VSG.

James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University and served as a special assistant in the office of the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. Follow him on Twitter: @James_Robbins.