Donald Trump has sent a diplomatic communiqué so shocking that it bears reading in full without preamble.
“Dear Jonas,” the 79-year-old president wrote to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
“Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.
“I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
Even by Trump’s standards, this letter is so dangerous and so delusional that there is no longer any question that the president is mentally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” as laid out in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
It is clearly not rational to start a war because your feelings got hurt by not winning a prize that you were not even eligible for. It is certainly not rational to sabotage the country’s national security—emboldening Russia and China—over those hurt feelings.
The president’s letter claims that Denmark alone is protecting Greenland from Russia and China, but the entire NATO alliance is built on the concept of mutual defense, which treats an attack on one member as an attack on all. This is what is keeping Greenland safe: the collective might of continental Europe, the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.
The president, however, is ready to effectively destroy this alliance and risk plunging the world into a global conflict because the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which is independent from Støre’s government, was not willing to violate its own policies to award him a Nobel Peace Prize for “stopping 8 Wars PLUS” that mostly only existed in his aging mind.
These are not the mental calculations of a sane person—they’re a fever dream that even Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping never would have dared to imagine coming true, until now.
They’re also extreme even by the standards of a president—and an administration—that seems to constantly plumb new lows without ever reaching the bottom.
For the past year, the Daily Beast has covered every bats--t moment of Trump’s presidency.
We have debunked so many of his bizarre and utterly false statements—claims about imaginary investments, “cancer-causing” windmills, and non-existent wars, just to name a few—that there are days in which it feels as though all we do is fact-check the executive branch of the U.S. government.
We have debated the extent to which we can call these claims “lies” because the president truly seems to believe many of them.
As his statements have become more outlandish, we have also chronicled the president’s deteriorating health, from his physical symptoms—bruised hands, swollen ankles, and his alarming habit of falling asleep during high-stakes meetings—to evidence of cognitive decline that at least one doctor has said is consistent with the effects of a stroke.
The president is, simply put, not a well man. He subsists on a diet of fast food and aspirin, stays up until the wee hours of the night doom-scrolling on social media, and spent Christmas day rage-posting on his Truth Social platform.
This is why impeachment is not enough.
Impeachment is a political process that punishes officials for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
At this point it’s become almost cliché to point out how many of the president’s actions would be impeachable offenses if anyone else were president, or if congressional Republicans weren’t such cowards.
It’s nevertheless worth repeating that Trump is occupying American cities with a paramilitary force, fantasizing about canceling elections, using the threat of tariffs to try to blackmail U.S. allies into giving up their sovereign territory, trying to lock up his political rivals, and starting wars without congressional approval.
He is also trying to create an organization to rival the United Nations, whose dubious working title is the “Board of Peace,” governed by Trump himself. The group has a $1 billion buy-in, and Putin himself has been invited to join.
In other words, the danger posed by Russia is so great that Trump needs to control Greenland, but not so great that it precludes participation in Trump’s peace board.
The president’s threats to invade an ally and destroy America’s national security standing over a peace prize snub are also no doubt grounds for impeachment, but they’re more than that. They’re evidence of a man who is simply not able to lead this country.
The 25th Amendment had been discussed but not yet drafted when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. With no clear rules for the transfer of power in place, Nov. 22, 1963, was a day of both tragedy and confusion, according to the U.S. Constitution Center.
Kennedy’s shocking death, combined with the realities of the Cold War, forced lawmakers to get serious about adopting formal rules about what would happen when a president died, resigned, or became incapacitated.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, which was finally ratified in 1967, allows the vice president and a majority of Cabinet members to declare the president is unable to discharge the duties of the office. If the president objects, the matter goes before Congress, which can decide with a two-thirds vote to permanently remove the president and install the vice president.
The process obviously presents many practical hurdles when it comes to Trump. His Cabinet was chosen for their loyalty to the president above all else, and congressional Republicans are terrified to rein in Trump even on deeply unpopular issues such as his tariffs and foreign invasions.
Reasonable people can also differ when it comes to how much better it would be to have JD Vance in charge, given that he has been fully on board with the president’s domestic takeover of U.S. cities and his imperial ambitions abroad.
But the entire Trump project—and to a larger extent the MAGA movement—is at its core an exercise in collective delusion. The whole enterprise rests on Americans rejecting the very facts staring them in the face.
Removal under the 25th Amendment might not be politically likely, but it’s a constitutional tool that must be seriously discussed. To do otherwise would be to indulge the dangerous alternative reality that Trump and his supporters are so desperate to construct.
Janna Brancolini is an American journalist based in Rome, Italy, covering law, politics, and foreign policy for the Daily Beast. She originally moved to Italy on a Fulbright fellowship after earning her law degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
