Mad Kings Don't Stop Themselves. They Must Be Stopped.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in the 1980s, we visited Neuschwanstein Castle, the fantasy palace perched on a Bavarian cliff that looks like it escaped from a fairy tale. Tour guides will tell you about its beauty and its role as an inspiration for Disney, but they’ll also share a more unsettling story that today echoes Donald Trump.

Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II, a ruler who withdrew from reality, governed through spectacle instead of policy, ignored his ministers, and bankrupted Bavaria by indulging his own grandiosity and a never-ending stream of construction and renovation projects. (Neuschwanstein was only one of three castles he built.) Bavaria eventually dealt with Mad King Ludwig: his own government declared him mentally unfit to rule and removed him from the throne.

That memory of Ludwig and his architectural obsessions has been haunting me lately, and it’s frankly astonishing that more people in the media aren’t asking the same question I’m bringing up here (and people are constantly calling into my radio/TV show about): “Is Trump losing his sanity?”

I’m not talking about his well-documented lifelong narcissism, his sociopathic inability to feel or even understand the pain of other people, his bullying, or even his compulsive lying, greed, and lechery; this is about whether he’s fit for the job he’s holding or is losing his touch with reality in a way that endangers both our nation and world peace.

When Trump held his press conference announcing the invasion of Venezuela and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, a reporter asked the most basic question imaginable: Who is running Venezuela now and going forward?

Trump first claimed that he was in charge, but then when other reporters asked for details he waved his hand toward the men standing behind him and said, “They are.” Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, General Dan Caine, and Pete Hegseth.

The expressions on their faces told the real story: Surprise, confusion, and even alarm. This was clearly, visibly news to them. Shocking news, even.

Did he just decide to BS his way through the press conference like he’s done so much of his life? Didn’t he realize this was a violation of both international law and the US Constitution? Did he think for a moment that he’s the king of the Americas? Or the world?

The next day we discovered the truth their expressions revealed; there was no plan for governing Venezuela, or even trying to via an occupation Iraq-style. There was no congressional authorization; in fact, he told the oil companies before the raid but didn’t bother to inform Congress until yesterday. (Although the oil companies now say he’s lying.)

There was no public debate and no involvement of any visible constitutional process involved in this invasion and body-snatch. Under our federal system, the president doesn’t get to just improvise an occupation or administration of a foreign nation from a podium.

Even Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush didn’t try to pull that off; all sought congressional authorizations for their wars and each gave explanations that at least gave a hat-tip to the traditional American values of democracy, peace, and the rule of law.

Congress, after all, declares war under our Constitution, as well as controlling the purse that makes that war possible. Even the idea of “running” another country would require massive legal, diplomatic, and military frameworks, and now we discover that none of that stuff existed. Instead, apparently, Trump had an impulsive thought or idea and just blurted it out.

That moment should have set off loud alarms throughout Washington and should have shot across our media like a meteorite. Instead, it drifted by as simply another strange episode in a presidency that’s taught us to pretend the abnormal is now normal.

Democrats (and a few Republicans) condemned Trump’s claim that he was running Venezuela; Republican politicians are now twisting themselves into pretzels to try to justify it. Reporters were simply confused. It’s nuts.

And in just the few days since then, Trump has openly threatened to seize Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, even Mexico. These aren’t policy proposals. They also aren’t rooted in American or international law, military or political strategy, or diplomacy.

They are, instead, Mad King Ludwig-like expressions of personal fantasy, of imperial imagination, of a man who appears increasingly convinced — who actually believes — that all power in America and perhaps around the world flows from his will alone.

And then there’s Trump’s bizarre online behavior, like posting over 100 times a night, and promoting a tweet saying that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz had hired a hit on State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, close personal friends of Walz’s.

Or his refusal to consider the last Venezuelan election winner, María Corina Machado, to run the country because she “stole” the Nobel prize from him.

Rachel Maddow last night on her television program suggested that the real reason Trump invaded Venezuela was simply because he could. Like a child, or a mad king, he wanted to play with his soldiers, watch them kill people and blow things up, and he doesn’t want anybody to tell him that he can’t.

And, I would add, eventually he plans to turn them on people like you and me. Once he’s made sure they’ll do anything he demands, no matter how bizarre, no matter how wrong, no matter how illegal. That’s why he’s now going after Senator Mark Kelly and other members of Congress for telling soldiers they don’t have to follow illegal orders.

Lev Parnas, who once worked closely with Trump and still hears from people inside his orbit, writes that Trump is receiving regular intravenous infusions of a new Alzheimer’s medication, administered through veins in his hands, whose known side effects include “sleepiness” during the day, “poor judgment,” and “impaired impulse control.” It could explain the bruises, the CT scans and MRIs, and the regular cognitive tests that the medication requires.

Not to mention the increasingly bizarre and grandiose behavior.

I’m not diagnosing Trump, but I am watching — a shocked world is watching — a pattern of behavior that is becoming more erratic, more impulsive, and more detached from constitutional reality week by painful week.

This also isn’t a partisan observation; I’m describing precisely the scenario the Framers and a later Congress worried about when they designed safeguards for presidential incapacity. The 25th Amendment wasn’t written for removing villains but rather for those moments when a president can’t or won’t reliably discharge the duties of his office but doesn’t have the good grace, insight, or ability to step down himself.

But constitutional tools are only as strong as the people willing to use them.

Bavaria in the nineteenth century had fewer options than we do. It had no elections to depose Mad King Ludwig, and no amendment laying out a clear procedure for replacing him.

For years, Ludwig had ministers serving him who watched how crazy he’d become but nonetheless delayed, rationalized, and hoped the problem would solve itself. It wasn’t until the damage became so great, as the state trembled on the verge of bankruptcy, that it was impossible to ignore any longer.

Modern America, on the other hand, has elections, courts, and a theoretically independent Congress. And we have the 25th Amendment. What we lack right now, however, is courage in the GOP and Trump’s cabinet.

Republican members of Congress know that a president can’t unilaterally invade or administer foreign nations on his own whim or impulse. They know that threatening annexation destabilizes the entire world, and Trump’s handed both Putin, Netanyahu, and Xi the rationalizations they all crave to expand their own empires.

Even Republicans know that governing by impulse isn’t strength but, instead, represents a very real danger to our republic. And yet they remain silent, calculating that confronting Trump is riskier to their careers than indulging him is to the country.

That GOP calculation is the real threat.

Trump’s love of military spectacle also fits perfectly — and dangerously — into this pattern. Like Ludwig staging operas and medieval fantasies in his version of the Kennedy Center, Trump treats America’s armed forces as props in his own pathetic personal drama. Rallies, salutes, parades, flyovers, and dramatic announcements substitute for deliberation, applause substitutes for legitimacy, and the human costs, the constitutional limits, and the long-term consequences are all fading into the background.

Neuschwanstein still stands today, beautiful and empty, a monument to what happens when fantasy replaces governance. Bavaria survived despite Ludwig, not because of him. Twenty-first century America, however, doesn’t have the luxury of turning its current ruler into a picturesque lesson (complete with a Ludwig-style ballroom) after the damage is done. A nuclear-armed superpower can’t afford indulgence that’s pretending to be patience.

The Constitution isn’t self-enforcing and doesn’t rise up on its own when norms are trampled. It instead relies on people in positions of authority to choose responsibility over fear; that’s why federal officials and our soldiers pledge their allegiance to our Constitution rather than to our government or any particular administration or person.

We hold the rulebook sacred, not the rulers.

If Republicans continue to refuse to even acknowledge the danger in front of them, history suggests the reckoning will come anyway, just at a far higher cost.

Bavaria eventually acted, not because it was easy but because delay had become more dangerous than dealing with a psychologically incapacitated and emotionally stunted ruler. The question facing the United States today is whether we’ll learn from that history or insist on repeating it.

Mad kings rarely stop themselves: they’re stopped when the people around them decide the country matters more than the crown.

Let your elected officials, particularly the Republicans, know your thoughts on the issue. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121. And pass it along…