Chris Trotter
It was the movie in which Humphrey Bogart (pictured) proved he was more than just an ugly face. The Caine Mutiny (1954) reaches its climax with Bogart’s character, the paranoid Captain Queeg, mentally unravelling before a court martial made suddenly aware of why the officers of the USS Caine were required to remove their senior officer from command.
The script calls for the court to be reduced to shocked silence, and Bogart’s performance delivered in spades. The click-click-clicking of the ball-bearings Queeg habitually reaches for when under pressure provides the sound-track for his spiralling descent into paranoid delusion.
Bogart’s performance was riveting.
US Vice President JD Vance
In the context of the growing chorus of American jurists, journalists, politicians and dismayed citizens calling for Vice-President JD Vance to invoke s 4 of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution against a President displaying what they insist are increasing signs of mental fragility, it is easy to see why thoughts might stray to the fictional captain of the USS Caine.
But America has already experienced its moment of political life imitating art. It was 1974, and the man in the Oval Office was Richard Nixon.
Former President Richard Nixon
The Watergate scandal had slowly consumed the Nixon presidency to the point where, just as in The Caine Mutiny, the American nation had been reduced to horrified silence.
Back in 1974, however, the initiative lay with the legislative branch of the US government which responded to what it saw as Nixon’s “high crimes and misdemeanours” by setting in motion the constitutional process of impeachment.
That was enough. Confronted by a grim delegation of Republican Party senators who had informed Nixon bluntly that after the House had impeached him, they – and the required two-thirds of the Senate – would surely vote to remove him from office, Nixon resigned the presidency.
American constitutional scholars and historians still celebrate that moment, rightly asserting that the Constitution had worked exactly as the Founding Fathers intended.
Against a rogue executive branch, the legislative and judicial branches of the state had taken the measures necessary to protect the rights and freedoms of its citizens. The American republic had proved itself to be what John Adams, writing in 1775, had demanded it should be: “a government of laws, and not of men”.
Errant behaviour
Fifty-two years after Nixon’s removal from the White House, the constitutional health of the United States is nothing like so robust.
The most ominous difference between the 1970s and the 2020s is that the independence of the legislative branch, its willingness to defend the Constitution against an “imperial” presidency, is no longer evident.
The “spirit of faction” of which the Founding Fathers were so fearful has completely overtaken the Congress. The Republican Party in particular has become the creature of Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) political movement.
Confronted with the increasingly errant behaviour of the 47th President, Republican senators may shake their heads in disbelief but they will not threaten to remove him from office as their predecessors threatened Nixon in 1974.
Nor is it likely that the House of Representatives, still dominated – albeit narrowly – by the Republican Party, will avail itself of the impeachment process. Not while its majority endures.
It is worth recalling that even as an angry mob was assailing the Capitol building on 6 January 2021 and howling for the blood of the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House, there were 147 Republican congresspersons willing to vote for the effective annulment of the 2020 presidential election result.
The pre-eminent constitutional check on presidential overreach, the legislative branch, is no longer willing to fulfil its duty. The guard-rail that remained so firmly in place in 1974 has long since been hacked through and cast aside.
Which is why those appalled by President Trump’s behaviour, most especially his threat to destroy the entire Iranian civilisation, are reaching in desperation for the 25th Amendment.
High bar
Ratified in 1967, the amendment was Congress’s response to the political shock and uncertainty that followed the assassination of President John F Kennedy in November 1962.
It clarifies the line of succession and provides a clear process for securing the continuity of presidential authority in the event an incumbent’s sudden death or incapacity.
So far, so sensible, but the provisions for transferring presidential power most redolent with political danger are those contained in s 4 of the 25th Amendment – the procedure for removing an incapacitated President who is unaware of, or refuses to recognise, his incapacitation.
The authors of the amendment were faced with a huge and potentially fatal problem: how to protect the republic from a person who was no longer capable of discharging the powers and duties of the presidency, without at the same time creating a mechanism for an ambitious and unscrupulous Vice-President to mount what would in effect be a coup d’etat against a legitimate and still competent President.
The solution they came up with is, on its face, practically guaranteed to make the problem much, much worse.
If the Vice-President were able to persuade more than half the Cabinet to sign a letter informing the most senior senator and the Speaker of the House that the President was no longer capable of discharging the powers and duties of his office, then he would immediately become the “Acting President” of the United States.
But if the deposed President formally disputed the Acting President’s claim of incapacity, then it would require the opposition of two-thirds of both the House and the Senate to prevent the deposed President from re-occupying the Oval Office
If the Vice-President was able to persuade over half the Cabinet to sign a letter informing the most senior Senator and the Speaker of the House that the President is no longer capable of discharging the powers and duties of his office, then he would immediately become the “Acting President” of the United States.
As if matters were not now sufficiently fraught with danger, the amendment gives Congress up to three weeks to decide which President – the elected one, or the acting one – should lead the country.
Translate this sequence of events from the hypothetical to the actual and instantly it becomes clear that any recourse to s 4 of the 25th Amendment in 2026 would spark a civil war.
If, as demanded by 50 Democratic Party congresspersons on 7 April 2026, JD Vance invoked the 25th Amendment and was somehow able to persuade half of Donald Trump’s fanatically loyal Cabinet to join him in deposing their boss, what are the chances that the President would go quietly?
Most people would say “slim”.
Trump’s loyal MAGA supporters would be even less likely to accept the deposition of the man they worked so hard to return to the White House. Their most probable response would be to grab their guns and take to the streets. Very quickly, American politics would turn very ugly.
And who would the armed forces and the police obey? Acting-President Vance? Or ex-President Trump?
How would the Supreme Court respond?
A mutineer’s charter
Congress itself could hardly avoid being rent by antagonisms of a ferocity not witnessed since the years immediately preceding the American Civil War. How long would it be before the armed defenders of President Trump flocked to the Capitol for a second attempt at hanging a Vice-President?
Clearly, no one in possession of their right mind is going to accuse Donald Trump of losing his. Vice-President Vance may be ambitious, but he’s not stupid. He knows he’d have to lace the Cabinet’s coffee with acid to have the slightest chance of winning half of them over to the proposition that Mad King Donald must be overthrown.
With the terrifying precedent of 6 January 2021 before them, what else would the House and Senate do but overwhelmingly back Trump’s resumption of the presidency on the first ballot?
The framers of the 25th Amendment admitted to being heavily influenced by both the novel and the film version of The Caine Mutiny.
What are those occupying subordinate positions supposed to do when the person in charge starts making ever more irrational and dangerous decisions? The solution arrived at by the USS Caine’s officers was to declare their mentally ill captain “disabled”.
But how is a presidency-ending disability to be defined – and by whom? More to the point, how is it to be distinguished from presidential policies with which some people, maybe even a majority of people, strongly disagree? How to frame an amendment for determining unfitness for office that does not immediately become a mutineer’s charter?
Finally, and most disturbingly, what are responsible politicians supposed to do when, instead of the entire court martial staring at Captain Queeg with a mixture of pity and alarm, half the room erupts into tumultuous applause and chants of “USA! USA! USA!”?
What happens when half the republic is as mad as its leader?
Chris Trotter
Chris Trotter has been observing, writing and commenting on politics for nearly 40 years. He is the author of the Bowalley Road blog
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