Never elect a lunatic, because once he’s ensconced, the 25th Amendment is basically powerless to oust him.

Hopefully we’ve learned that valuable lesson. For years there was sporadic talk, even among some White House aides, about removing Donald Trump because he was (in the language of the Amendment) “unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.” Indeed, with only 29 days left on the clock, Trump is burrowing ever deeper into his psychological bunker with tinfoil-hatted hacks like conspiracy lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael “Martial Law!” Flynn. Powell in particular is so bonkers that even fever swamp denizen Rudy Giuliani is alarmed.

According to one new report, fed by leakers inside the bunker, “Trump is lashing out and everyone is in the blast zone…Trump thinks everyone around him is weak, stupid or disloyal – and increasingly seeks comfort only in people who egg him on to overturn the election results. We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are by the conversations unfolding inside the White House.”

But alas, the 25th Amendment – crafted after the JFK assassination and ratified in 1967 – has a massive loophole. It can work well if a president is physically debilitated, by a coma for instance, or if he or she is otherwise seriously unhealthy with few prospects for recovery. But the Amendment doesn’t define the words “unable to discharge,” particularly with respect to whether a president is mentally unfit to serve.

In the best of all possible worlds (to borrow a phrase from Voltaire), there would be explicit constitutional language to effectuate the ouster of a wild animal who tolerates talk of martial law and contemplates seizing voting machines and threatens not to leave the White House and stokes violence among his locked-and-loaded cultists and thinks that the ghost of Hugo Chavez wreaked havoc and still insists that he “won” by “a lot” even though the race he decisively lost has been certified in all 50 states and vetted by a Republican-led Supreme Court. What more evidence do we need that this unhinged huckster is threatening the peace and sabotaging the legitimacy of our democracy?

Unfortunately, the 25th Amendment never addresses mental incapacity; worse yet, it basically allows a president who’s nuts to stay in office by insisting that he or she is not nuts. The vice president and a majority of the “principal officers of the executive departments” – the Cabinet – can determine that a president is unfit to serve. Fine so far. But if an unfit president still claims to be fit as a fiddle, the decision ultimately falls to Congress – where two-thirds of each chamber must vote for removal. That’s a very high bar, assuming a crisis would even get that far. An adoring supplicant like Mike Pence would never have acted in the national interest by invoking the 25th.

We’re stuck with the amendment as written. Basically, we screwed ourselves by electing Trump in the first place. As the historian Joshua Seitz remarked a few years ago, “It didn’t occur to Congress that Americans might need an amendment to protect themselves from their own poor judgment.”

Trump made it abundantly clear who and what he was long before the ’16 election, but the credulous and the oblivious were fine with that. And lest we forget, Trump was literally three days into his reign when he decreed without a shred of evidence that he’d lost the popular vote only because five million people had voted illegally; on Twitter, he announced, “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD.” And that was after he’d won.

Nine days into his presidency, I warned in a column that “the day may come when even Republicans are finally compelled to acknowledge, in the national interest, that Trump is dangerously off his rocker…(and) he rants us into a (crisis) that could get a lot of people killed? His ‘voter fraud’ delusion is merely a toxic appetizer.”

For all the talk about invoking the 25th Amendment, it was always clear that it would never protect us from our own folly. As Peter Wehner, former White House aide to three Republican presidents, remarked yesterday, “We’re just going to have to get through the next 29 days and learn from this. This is what happens when you elect someone who is essentially sociopathic.”