There are warrants to worry that the daily ad hominem attacks on the president and his counselors are not commonplace partisan dissent by those out of power but instead a mounting cry for regime change well before 2021.

Just as the Caine’s know-it-all, Lt. Thomas Keefer, says of Queeg—“Has it ever occurred to you that our captain might be unbalanced?”—those accusing Trump suggest his leadership is so perilous that it must be blocked by extraordinary means.

The Caine crew list of those suggesting something must be done to Trump grows longer and bolder weekly, with much attention to the favorite plot device of White House fiction, the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, which permits the vice president and a simple majority of the Cabinet to remove a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duty of his office.”

Eliot Cohen, director of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Studies, former Bush official, prognosticates in the Atlantic: “It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.”

The Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks, former Obama official, writing in Foreign Policy, also points to the avenue of the 25th Amendment—and then tops everyone with speculation on a scenario that “until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”

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