WHEN THE PRESIDENT IS INSANE...

We've never had a presidency like this before. We have what appears to be a clinically insane president, who, because of the office he holds and the deference and enabling he receives from his staff (not least of which have been his press secretaries), has apparently lost all concept of boundaries or norms of behavior.

Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, and his wife Edith pretty much ran the country- but that was in 1919 and 1920, and there was no such thing as electronic media, and the print press of the day apparently didn't think it was worth mentioning. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/woodrow-wilson-stroke

Then we had the Nixon White House until his resignation in the face of impeachment in 1974, when the president appeared to be in the grips of raging paranoia. http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/41698. Among others, he blamed Jews, intellectuals, and graduates of elite colleges in the Ivy League or Berkeley (of course many individuals- like Daniel Elllsburg of Pentagon Papers fame whose psychiatrist's office was burglarized by the Watergate plumbers, were all three).

Finally, in the 1980's, you had a president with early Alzheimers, Ronald Reagan, whose supporters somehow claim he was one of the greatest in history, when all of the facts reveal that he had little concept of what was going on in the world or around him (possibly partially related to the injuries he suffered in the 1981 assassination attempt). http://abcnews.go.com/…/ronald-reagan-alzheimers-pre…/story….

In the mid 1960's, the country, through Congress, decided that in a world where with the push of a button tens of millions of lives could be extinguished and the world plunged into chaos, we needed a better "fail safe" to protect us from an incapacitated president. Of course, the reverse was also true: we needed someone in the White House who could respond in moments to an emergency- such as Soviet missiles launched against us. Thus, the 25th Amendment was proposed in Congress and later ratified by the States. https://www.vox.com/…/2/9/144889…/25th-amendment-trump-pence.

And right now, it's not impeachment which is the country's -- and the world's- line of defense against a mad man in the White House. It's the power bestowed on the President's cabinet by the 25th amendment. But my betting is that it will be Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller who will be- when history is written- given credit for saving the country and the world. I predict resignation of Trump in the face of overwhelming evidence of criminal violations, in exchange for a promise of immunity from prosecution for himself and his family. And it will happen prior to November of 2018. You read it here first.