Why Trump May Not Serve Out His Presidency

He will only get crazier, and at some point Republicans will cut their losses.

“If something cannot go on forever,” the economist Herbert Stein once said, “it will stop.” A logician would scorn this as a tautology, but it’s a useful one for contemplating all sorts of problems that never seem to end. Some things that feel like they can’t go on may continue for a very long while. The subject of Stein’s famous comment (at a 1986 economic symposium) was the national debt. Today it’s more than ten times its size in 1986, so the national debt turns out to be something that can go on—if not forever (forever’s a long time), then far longer that anyone would have believed.

But a less dismal way to read Stein’s tautological pronouncement, subsequently known as Stein’s Law, is that some things that feel like they will go on forever may surprise us by stopping. An example would be what John F. Kennedy called America’s “long twilight struggle” against Soviet communism. When Kennedy recited that phrase in his inaugural address, the struggle had already lasted 40 years (subtracting four when the United States and the Soviets were allies in World War II). By 1961 the Cold War seemed a cinch to last another century. Instead, it ended 28 years later with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Today the bad thing that feels like it will go on forever—or anyway, for 28 more months—is the presidency of Donald Trump. Is Trump like the national debt, or is he like the Berlin Wall? Trump’s political career has certainly lasted longer than anybody (including me) could have conceived when it began in 2015, and his comeback after the January 6 insurrection was particularly unsettling. But lately I’ve started to consider that our nightmarish political epoch may end sooner than we expect. Even as some worry that Trump will defy the Constitution and run for a third term, I’ve come to doubt that he can finish his second.

My reason for thinking Trump may be like the Berlin Wall is the recent acceleration in Trump’s mental deterioration. Yes, I know that in May Trump passed his Montreal Cognitive Assessment with a score of 30 out of 30 (or anyway that’s what his doctors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center said). I also know that while that test is said to be pretty good at diagnosing dementia, it isn’t great at detecting mild cognitive impairment. “Mild cognitive impairment” basically means grandpa doesn’t have to check........

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