Amid all the alarming and unhinged comments of the president of the United States in recent days threatening Iran with genocide--remarks beyond even the usual cray-cray blather from Donald Trump--it was a statement from his spokesperson on Tuesday that really put the madness in the White House in perspective.

"Only the president knows where things stand and what he will do," Karoline Leavitt said.

She issued those words just hours before Trump's 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline for Iran to either reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping or face Armageddon--that is, war crimes by the United States. The statement from the White House press secretary was as clear a description as Americans could get of governance under Trump these days: A mad king reigns, virtually unchecked.

And as a practical matter, there is nothing under the Constitution, neither impeachment nor removal under the 25th Amendment, that can be done about him. There's only voters' opportunity to eject the complicit Republican majorities in the House and Senate in November's midterm elections, to install a Democratic--and democratic--check on Trump for the remaining two years of his term.

By now we know that, just before Trump's deadline to Iran warning "a whole civilization will die tonight," he announced a fragile two-week ceasefire for negotiations. The commander in chief declared victory, natch. But so did Iran. And it had the better of the argument: Iran continued to control and monetize passage through the strait, unlike before Trump's war began Feb. 28, and already on Wednesday it flexed that power by closing the route in retaliation for Israeli strikes. The ceasefire also lets Iran retain possession of its enriched, nearly bomb-grade uranium, and the nation won Trump's offer of possible tariff and sanctions relief.

So much for the "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!" he demanded in a post a month ago.

I'm writing these words on Wednesday. Who knows where things will stand by the time you're reading this? "Only the president knows."

Presidential rule by fiat and whim would be wrong in any case under the Constitution's checks and balances of power, and specifically of war power. But in Trump's case, America has a president who lately has piled on the evidence that he is mentally unstable, unfit for the office.

And spare us the cheerleaders' claims on Fox News about how he's playing multi-dimensional chess. When even Alex Jones likens Trump to "crazy King Lear" and calls for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from power--echoing former Trump promoters including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens, among others--you know he's crossed a line by his unilateral war-making and profane threats (on Easter Sunday!) of genocidal apocalypse.

The country "can't be a therapy session for ... a troubled man like this," Trump's first-term attorney general William P. Barr told CBS in 2023 as Trump campaigned to return to office.

If only the presidency were therapy for Trump. Instead he's like a power addict in the world's most powerful job, mainlining its intoxicants, and no one will stop him.

That leaves the voters, who in special and off-year elections as recently as Tuesday have shown their zeal to punish Trump's party. We can hope that a new Congress will check him come January.

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