President Donald Trump is not well mentally and must be removed under the 25th Amendment, Richard Painter, the former chief ethics attorney for President Geroge W. Bush, told MSNBC.
Painter said, however, that this is not going to happen, because Trump “stocked his cabinet with people who are unwilling to do that, and Congress is apparently unwilling to even try to remove him through impeachment.”
Painter said the latest sign of Trump’s ill health is his declaration of a national emergency to pay for his promised wall on the southern border, a move he said was “unconstitutional, illegal and will do enormous damage to the Republican Party,” as well as “tear the country apart.”
He said, “we need to understand, though, why we’re in this situation. The president is not well at all mentally. I think he’s an extreme narcissist. He has been denied what he wants, his wall, and he is having a hissy fit. He is out of control, and he will not take ‘no’ for an answer from Congress.”
Painter also said further proof that the president is not well mentally is that Trump believes Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence services.
Painter explained that if the situation on the southern border is determined to be an emergency, “than just about… any policy priority of any president could be an emergency, and that’s not the meaning of the word emergency within the act.”
He further explained that the purpose of the act was not to use it to override the allocation powers given to Congress by the Constitution, which is what this declaration of an emergency is an attempt to do.