In April 2026, Congressman Jamie Raskin introduced a bill in the House establishing a Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office. More than 50 fellow Democrats signed on. A few weeks later, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene — not exactly a friend of the Democrats — joined the chorus. The trigger was a series of Trump posts on Truth Social: threats to destroy “an entire civilization” in Iran, profane tirades against Pope Leo XIV, AI-generated images depicting Trump himself as Jesus Christ, demands for “complete and total control over Greenland,” and an episode in Davos where the president referred to Greenland as “Iceland” four times in a single speech.

Senator Bernie Sanders called the recent posts “the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.” Senator Chris Murphy described them as “the ramblings of a man who has lost touch with reality.” NBC News medical analyst Dr. Vin Gupta openly raised the possibility of early Alzheimer’s or frontotemporal dementia. Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett, in a letter to Vice President JD Vance, called Trump “deranged, likely suffering from dementia.”

In parallel, Raskin demanded that the White House physician conduct a comprehensive cognitive assessment of the president and release the results publicly. The White House response was brief: “Lightweight Jamie Raskin is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person.”

Search traffic for “25th amendment” has spiked. Most people, however, don’t really understand two things: what this amendment can and can’t actually do, and where, in the view of specialists, eccentric behavior ends and clinical signs begin.

This post is about precedents. About how, for sixty years now, America has been trying to answer one question: can you remove a person from power because he might be sick? And what psychologists and psychiatrists are actually saying in 2026.

Goldwater, 1964: The First Attempt to Diagnose a President Through a Magazine

It didn’t start with Trump. It started in 1964 with Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee from the party’s far-right wing.

Fact magazine sent a survey to twelve thousand three hundred fifty-six American psychiatrists with one question: “Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?” Only 2,417 responded. Of those, 1,189 publicly said no. The cover of the magazine ran the headline: “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to Be President.”

Inside, doctors threw around diagnoses about a man none of them had ever met: paranoid schizophrenia, narcissistic personality, latent homosexuality, psychotic disposition. One psychiatrist wrote that Goldwater had a “sadomasochistic character.” Another claimed he suffered from a “severe paranoid disorder.”

Goldwater lost the election but sued the magazine for libel. And won. The professional community received a public humiliation. Psychiatry as a science suddenly looked like a political book club with credentials.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association adopted Annotation 7.3 — what’s now known as the Goldwater Rule:

It is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion on a public figure unless he or she has conducted a personal examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.

This rule still applies today. It’s the reason you rarely see a serious psychiatrist on TV saying “Trump has dementia” or “he has narcissistic personality disorder.” They’re officially not allowed to.

Nixon, 1973: The Drunk President and the Nuclear Codes

Precedent number two is Richard Nixon during the final months of Watergate.

By August 1974, Nixon was, according to those around him, in a state of continuous emotional collapse. He cried, talked to portraits of dead presidents, drank heavily. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger gave a quiet order to military leadership: no nuclear orders from the president were to be carried out without first being cleared with him personally or with Secretary of State Kissinger. This was, strictly speaking, an unconstitutional move — but Schlesinger did it because he didn’t trust the mental state of the commander-in-chief.

Nobody tried to invoke the 25th Amendment. Nixon resigned on his own — once it became clear the Senate would vote to remove him through impeachment. The system was saved not by a medical mechanism but by a political one — and by Nixon’s personal decision to walk away.

This episode matters because it raised the question for the first time, point-blank: what does America do if the president holds the nuclear briefcase and isn’t in his right mind? The country still hasn’t found an answer.

Reagan, 1987: “He Slept Through Meetings With Me”

President Ronald Reagan was visibly fading by his second term. Years after leaving the White House, he would be officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

In 1987, then–Chief of Staff Howard Baker assembled a team to assess whether the 25th Amendment should be invoked. Several Reagan advisers were privately describing the president as “absent,” “forgetting who had walked into the room,” “asleep during meetings.” Baker had dinner with the president, observed him directly, and concluded: formally, he’s coping. The amendment was not invoked.

Seven years later, in 1994, Reagan published a letter to the nation announcing his diagnosis. When exactly the disease began is impossible to pin down — but many historians today believe the first cognitive symptoms appeared while he was still in office.

The lesson of this episode: the people closest to the president can see the problem, but have neither the tools nor the will to formalize it. Loyalists don’t air dirty laundry. And the 25th Amendment requires those very loyalists to vote for removal.

Trump, First Term: 27 Psychiatrists Write a Book — and Break the Ethics Code

In 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was published — a collection of essays by twenty-seven psychiatrists and psychologists who deliberately broke the Goldwater Rule. They argued that silence had become a moral choice they could no longer support. The contributors included Bandy Lee of Yale, Robert Jay Lifton, John Gartner.

Their argument was simple: the Goldwater Rule was created to protect the reputation of the profession, but if professionals see danger, they have a “duty to warn” — the same duty a psychiatrist has to warn the police if a patient announces an intention to kill someone.

The APA pushed back hard. In March 2017, the association expanded the rule. Now even using psychiatric terminology about a public figure became prohibited. Words like “narcissistic,” “disinhibited,” “paranoid” applied to Trump were now treated as ethics violations.

A few years later, Bandy Lee lost her position at Yale University — officially for unrelated reasons, but in academic circles many connect it to her public commentary about Trump. She sued the university and lost.

This is the context in which today’s specialists speak. Every comment carries professional risk.

What Psychologists Are Actually Saying Right Now, in Spring 2026

And yet they’re speaking.

Psychiatrist Geoff Grammer, who openly describes himself as “anti-MAGA,” said after Trump’s recent posts on Iran: “There’s a large differential here. It could be him feeling trapped and developing narcissistic rage. It could be that he’s becoming disinhibited. Or it could be that he’s just drifting toward who he naturally is.”

Trauma therapist Shari Botwin has commented that the recent posts and insults aimed at allies and opponents look like manifestations of deeply felt narcissistic insecurities.

Dr. Vin Gupta, NBC News medical analyst, said after the so-called “Dear Jonas letter” (Trump’s demand for control over Greenland) that the letter “crossed a line of normal adult behavior” and should have triggered “a more thorough public assessment of his neurological fitness.” He explicitly mentioned possible early signs of Alzheimer’s or frontotemporal dementia.

What unites all these comments: specialists carefully avoid a formal diagnosis. They speak of “differential diagnosis,” “possible signs,” “characteristic patterns.” This isn’t scientific caution for caution’s sake — it’s the professional self-preservation language. Saying more means losing your license.

The physical side raises questions too. In July 2025, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the president had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency. The bruises on Trump’s hands — large, persistent marks he himself attributed to “frequent handshaking” — kept appearing in the months that followed. In August 2025, Vice President Vance stated he was ready to assume the presidency, briefly fueling rumors that Trump was seriously ill.

A concept that keeps surfacing in analysis is sanewashing. When journalists quote Trump’s speeches, they tend to select the more coherent fragments, filtering out the rambling and confused ones. The reader ends up with a picture of a more lucid man than the one who actually spoke.

When you watch the president, in a single hour-and-a-half speech, refer to Greenland as “Iceland” four separate times — that isn’t a slip of the tongue. That’s a symptom specialists carefully call semantic paraphasia — a disorder in which a person substitutes one word for another that’s phonetically or semantically similar. It’s an early marker of cognitive decline. To be clear: a possible marker, not a diagnosis.

So Could the 25th Amendment Actually Work?

Short answer: almost certainly not. And not because Trump is healthy, but because the mechanism is built to be extremely hard to invoke.

Section 4 requires:

  • The agreement of the vice president. JD Vance has repeatedly affirmed his loyalty.
  • The agreement of a majority of the Cabinet — meaning people personally appointed by Trump himself.
  • If the president objects (and he will), two-thirds of both houses of Congress must agree within 21 days.

In 59 years of the amendment’s existence, Section 4 has been invoked exactly zero times. Not when Nixon was visibly losing control. Not when Reagan started fading. Not even when, after January 6, 2021, dozens of members of Congress publicly demanded that Vice President Mike Pence invoke it.

The Raskin bill is an attempt to bypass the first obstacle. It proposes an independent commission of former officials and physicians who could replace the Cabinet in this procedure. But even if the bill miraculously passed, Trump would veto it, and you’d need two-thirds to override the veto. Those votes don’t exist.

So the question of whether the 25th Amendment will be applied to Trump is almost rhetorical. It won’t. It’s a political statement, not a realistic mechanism.

But that political statement has another function: it puts on the public record that dozens of lawmakers, including some allies of the president, consider what’s happening abnormal. History will remember that, even if Trump serves out his term.

Why This Conversation Matters Even If You’re Not American

It’s tempting to wave it off: “That’s their internal mess.” But the story of the 25th Amendment and Trump raises questions that go far beyond American politics. And these are exactly the questions this whole blog is about.

How do we actually distinguish eccentricity from a disorder? Who decides? By what criteria?

When the subject is the president of the United States, you see a whole infrastructure: the Goldwater Rule, the White House physician, Congress, Cabinet, media. An entire country debating whether one man’s behavior is normal.

But what about your loved one? Or you yourself?

Most people live without any infrastructure at all. Nobody writes letters to Congress. Nobody convenes a commission. If someone close to you gradually starts behaving differently — getting more irritable, mixing up words, drifting from reality — the family usually notices too late. Or notices but doesn’t know what to do.

The same thing happens inside your own head. The anxiety that used to be episodic becomes background. The irritability that used to feel like a personality trait turns into a daily state. The insomnia that started “because of work” has dragged on for six months. And no Raskin shows up to say: “Hey, you should get an assessment.”

The line between “I’m just having a rough patch” and “something clinical is starting” usually isn’t visible from the inside. You notice it later — once it’s already far behind you.

What to Do With This in Real Life

A few things the history of these precedents shows:

  • The people around you often see it before you do. Nixon’s wife, Reagan’s advisers, the Goldwater-era psychiatrists — all of them noticed something well before it went public. If people close to you say your behavior has changed, that’s a signal worth listening to.
  • Professional help should be accessible, not heroic. Most people only get to a therapist when their state is already serious. That’s not because therapy is a last resort. It’s because access to it is poorly built in.
  • Self-observation is a skill, not a given. The ability to notice your own emotional patterns, dips, shifts in thinking — this is something you learn. Journals, regular self-reflection practices, structured conversations with yourself. They work.
  • Labels and diagnoses aren’t the goal. Functioning is. Can the person do what matters to them? Sustain relationships? Think clearly? Sleep? When the answers start turning to “no,” that’s reason to change something — even if there’s no formal diagnosis.

The 25th Amendment story shows: even the most powerful person on earth has no proper mechanism for getting an honest assessment of his own state. All the mechanisms are political, conflicted, distorted by loyalty.

The ordinary person doesn’t have those political distortions. But there are others: fear of stigma, reluctance to admit weakness, the habit of just toughing it out. And those distortions get in the way no less.

If you’ve read this far, what interests you probably isn’t only Trump. The story of the line between normal and disordered is one that touches everyone at some point. Through your own state. Through someone close to you. Through gradual changes that are hard to catch in time.

NLP Touch is an AI psychologist in your pocket — built to help you notice your own patterns before they become problems. No diagnoses, no pressure, no need to go anywhere or book anything. Just a conversation in which the AI asks the right questions and helps you hear what you’ve known for a long time but haven’t put into words.

The most honest mechanism for monitoring your own state is the one that’s always within reach.