October 20, 2024
I had hoped to write tonight about the farm bill, which Eric Hovde, running for the Senate from Wisconsin although it’s not clear he lives there, could not talk about in the debate between him and incumbent senator Tammy Baldwin on Friday. “I’m not an expert on the farm bill because I'm not in the U.S. Senate at this point in time,” Hovde said. “So I can’t opine specifically on all aspects of the farm bill.”
The farm bill is one of our most important pieces of legislation. It establishes the main agricultural and food policies of the government, covering price supports for farm products, especially corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, dairy, and sugar; crop insurance; conservation programs; and nutritional programs for 41 million low-income Americans, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps. It must pass every five years but has been held up by Republican extremists in the House and is now in limbo. One would think that anyone running for Senate should know it pretty well, especially in Wisconsin, where in 2022 farms produced $16.7 billion in agricultural products.
Perhaps this is why the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation has endorsed Baldwin, the first Democrat in nearly twenty years to receive their support.
But I cannot take tonight to explain the really quite interesting history of the farm bill (and why it contains our nutrition programs) because the real story of today is that the Republican candidate for president is not mentally able to handle the job of the presidency, and Republican leaders are trying to cover up that reality.
These two stories are related.
That same quest for power that appears to be driving Hovde to seek a Senate seat without knowing anything about a bill that is hugely important to the people he would be representing appears to be preventing Republican leaders from admitting that their 78-year-old candidate has lost the mental capacity necessary for managing the most powerful nation in the world, including its vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
The United States has guardrails to prevent an incapacitated president from exercising power.
The question of what to do when a president was unable to do his job was not really a major question until the post–World War II years. While presidents before then had been weakened—notably, Woodrow Wilson had had a stroke—medical care was poor enough that those presidents who sustained life-threatening injuries tended to die from them fairly quickly. At the same time, the difficulties of the travel necessary for a national political career made politics a young man’s game, so there really weren’t rumblings of mental incapacity from age.
But Republican president Dwight Eisenhower had seen the grave damage military leaders could do when they were incapacitated and unaware of their inability to evaluate situations accurately, and knew that the commander-in-chief must have a system in place to be replaced if he were unable to fulfill the mental requirements of his position.
Eisenhower took office in 1953, and two years later, he suffered a heart attack. Vice President Richard Nixon and members of the Cabinet agreed to a working plan to conduct business while the president recovered, but presidential assistant Sherman Adams noted that the crisis left everyone “uncomfortably aware of the Constitution's failure to provide for the direction of the government by an acting President when the President is temporarily disabled and unable to perform his functions.”
When Eisenhower went on to need an abdominal operation and then to have a minor stroke, concerns mounted. As Congress discussed a solution, Eisenhower took matters into his own hands. He drafted an informal agreement that he presented to Nixon. If the president became temporarily unable to do the duties of the office, the document gave to the vice president the power of “Acting President.”
The need to figure out what would happen if modern medicine could keep alive an incapacitated president became apparent after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Not only did the question of a president’s incapacity have to be addressed; so did the problem of succession. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was falsely rumored to have had a heart attack, and both the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate were old and doubted that they could adequately fulfill the duties of the presidency themselves.
Congress’s solution was the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, providing a system by which either the president or, if they were unable to realize their incapacity, members of the executive branch would transfer the powers of the president to the vice president. Eisenhower enthusiastically backed the idea that the nation should have coverage for a disabled president.
To anyone paying attention, it is clear that Trump is not in any shape to manage the government of the United States of America. He is canceling interviews and botching the ones he does sit for, while falling asleep at events where he is not actually speaking. He lies incessantly even when hosts point out that his claims have been debunked, and cannot answer a question or follow a train of thought. And his comments of the weekend—calling the vice president a “sh*t vice president,” telling a woman to get “your fat husband off the couch” to vote for him, and musing about a famous golfer’s penis—indicate that he has no mental guardrails left.
Today, in what apparently was designed to show Trump as relatable and to compete with the story that Vice President Harris worked at a McDonalds when she was in college, Trump did a photo op at a McDonalds in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where he took prepared fries out of the fryolator. It was an odd moment, for Trump has never portrayed himself as a man of the people so much as a man to lead the people, and the picture of him in a McDonald’s apron undercuts his image as a dominant leader.
But in any case, it was all staged: the restaurant was closed, the five “customers” were loyalists who had practiced their roles, and when Trump handed food through the drive-through window, he did not take money or make change.
"Now I have worked at McDonald's," he said afterward. "I've now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala."
The fact that someone on Trump’s campaign leaked to Politico that he is “exhausted” is almost certainly a sign that people down the ranks are deeply concerned about his ability to finish the campaign, let alone run the country. But party leaders continue to stand behind him, raising echoes of their staunch support during Trump’s two impeachment trials.
In 2019 the House of Representatives impeached Trump for his attempt to coerce Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and pervert the security of the United States to steal an election. The evidence was so overwhelming that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) noted: “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” But Republican senators—except Mitt Romney (R-UT), who voted to convict on one count—nonetheless acquitted Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
Trump’s second impeachment by the House in January 2021 for incitement of insurrection ended similarly. In the Senate, McConnell refused to change the schedule to enable the Senate to vote before a new president was inaugurated, thus giving himself, as well as other Republican senators, an out to vote against conviction on the grounds that Trump was no longer the president. Seven Republican senators joined the Democrats to convict, but forty-three continued to back Trump. In a speech after the vote, McConnell said he believed Trump was responsible for the January 6, 2021, attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election but that he would have to answer for that behavior in court.
But nearly four years later, Trump has not had to answer in court because the Supreme Court, stacked with his appointees thanks to Republican senators, has said that he cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties. While the courts sort out what counts as official duties, he is, once again, the Republican nominee for president. Leaders are standing behind him despite the fact he is demonstrating deeply concerning behavior.
When President Joe Biden decided not to accept the Democratic presidential nomination after his poor performance in his June debate with Trump, Republicans demanded that Vice President Harris and the Cabinet invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment, despite the fact that Biden’s job performance continued to be exemplary. We learned later that during the time of the debate, he was negotiating a historic prisoner swap involving multiple countries to free twenty-four prisoners, including Americans Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan.
Nonetheless, that one poor debate performance was enough for Republicans to condemn Biden’s ability to govern the nation. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) told the Fox News Channel that “Joe Biden has decided he isn’t capable of being a candidate; in so doing his admission also means he cannot serve as President.”
But Trump has been lying that immigrants are eating pets; calling voters fat pigs; basing his economic policy on a backward idea of how tariffs work; calling for prosecuting his enemies and making the civil service, military, and judiciary loyal to him; and praising a famous golfer’s “manhood”—hardly indications of a man able to take on the presidency of the United States.
And yet with regard to his mental acuity, Republican leaders offer only crickets.
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4942438-baldwin-hovde-wisconsin-senate-debate/
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2024/05/21/wisconsin-2022-census-agriculture-highlights
https://www.farmaid.org/issues/farm-policy/the-latest-updates-on-the-2023-farm-bill/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-town-hall-lancaster-kamala-harris-pennsylvania/
“’We Are F**CKED’: New Book Reveals How GOP Senators Bailed Out Trump During 1st Impeachment Trial, HuffPost, October 7, 2022; https://www.yahoo.com/news/f-ked-book-reveals-gop-110011623.html
Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian, Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump (New York: William Morrow, 2022).
John D. Feerick, “Presidential Succession and Inability: Before and After the Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” Fordham Law Review 79 (2010): 907–949, at https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4695&context=flr
https://apnews.com/article/russia-gershkovich-whelan-prisoner-swap-354df585ad321ecdbea4c0f2c557f0aa
Thank you so much for this Professor Richardson.
I am horrified by all of this as I watch from a distance in France. It is increasingly clear that the GOP is holding out now for the Vance, not Trump presidency, in which Thiel and Musk and other bad actors will make the US government in their image. I am wondering increasingly if the US citizenry will tolerate this without armed insurrection. A revolution is being foisted on them without a broad consensus (and many who support it are doing so out of profound ignorance and moral sloppiness).
If the Constitution and rule of law by a deranged psychopath and his retinue of sociopaths is visited on the US, one would think that all bets are simply off. The GOP will have committed an act of secession in removing the United States from its very self, essence, and spirit. And hell, Musk is not even a native born citizen - he should be nowhere in our government (apart from the simple fact that he's a deranged monster and racist).
Arnold Palmer? Eating cats and dogs? Working a fryer at McDonald's? When I think of the tradition of a Jefferson, a Lincoln, an FDR . . . I could vomit.
We all know where this is headed.
A Harris victory means prison for Trump.
A Trump victory means a lifetime of golfing for a retired, pardoned Trump.
He gave us the plan in 2020, saying that if Biden won, he’d quit in a month and Harris would become President.
We cannot afford anything other than a Harris victory.