Mark Graber, a leading public law scholar at the University of Maryland, posted this on Facebook (his response to a Newsweek inquiry that he did not expect to be published in full) and kindly gave permission for me to share it here. It seems to me exactly right.

There are both political and legal problems with efforts to invoke the 25th amendment.

The political problem is the 25th Amendment can be initiated only by the president or the Cabinet. Both, to say the least, are highly unlikely.

The legal problem is that the 25th Amendment was designed to deal with a medically incapacitated president, for example, a president who is unconscious or unable to physically perform the duties of the office. We might imagine a mentally ill president whose beliefs are so fantastic that he or she can no longer perform the job, but President Trump is not suffering from that form of psychosis. The reason President Trump is unfit for the presidency is that he is an habitual liar who thinks only of himself and his power, and he is a white supremacist, who has no empathy for others. These are in my judgment political disqualifications for the office of the presidency, but the American people disagreed in 2024. A fair case can be made that President Trump’s actions are impeachable, but that is a different part of the Constitution and suffers from the same political problem.

What we need is a Congress willing to say “no” by legislation, not doctors claiming that being a horrible person is a physical or mental disorder.

Donald Trump is a political problem that can be solved only by political mobilization. Lawyers can and should fight rearguard actions to slow down the drift to autocracy and add the mobilization effort, but the primary action must be in the mobilization, not the litigation.

Mobilization, I take it, means protests in the streets and mobilization at the ballot. Make-believe about the 25th Amendment is neither here nor there: Trump is an ignorant and lawless narcissist, but only impeachment is relevant to that, and while the Republicans are in thrall to the monster child, there is no chance of that.