Congressional Republicans are failing the Trump test

This is a test: After last week, can you find an excuse for congressional Republicans who refuse to admit that President Trump’s capacity to lead the nation is now legitimately in question? 

How do the same people who spent years attacking President Biden as mentally infirm cover their eyes to the threat posed by this nearly 80-year-old’s erratic outbursts and possible cognitive decline?

Less than two years ago, congressional Republicans scrutinized Biden’s every word, his every stumble, even the mechanics of how he signed documents. 

But that chorus of critics on Capitol Hill is now silent as President Trump raises far greater danger with an unsteady hand in control of the nation’s nuclear arsenal.  

On Easter Sunday, Trump demonstrated a disturbing lack of stability to all the world by writing to Iranian leaders on social media: “Open the F—— Strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” 

He added: “A whole civilization will die…I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”  

At that point, partisanship had to recede. 

This is no longer a matter of sharing video of Biden’s stumbles on the steps to Air Force One. And there is no comparing Biden’s mumbling to Trump’s loss of control in the middle of a war.  

What is happening now is far more serious. We are dealing with a president’s unstable behavior as he has the nation spending a billion dollars a day on a war he started without evidence of a clear threat to the U.S.  

Trump is acting, according to multiple reports, against the advice of top intelligence, senior military officers, and his vice president.  

Despite all those signs of Trump’s emotional and judgment problems, congressional Republicans apparently think their responsibility is to back Trump. They refuse to deal with his declining ability to conduct the nation’s business. 

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and the Republican House majority have more to say about their support for the Olympics banning transgendered athletes. The chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Brian Mast (R- Fla.), is preoccupied with social media posts on the birth of bald eagles. 

The Speaker remained silent about Trump even as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the House minority leader, spoke of the need to stop the president “from getting us into World War III.” Jeffries proposed holding a House vote to deny the president the power to fight the war. 

In the Senate, the top Republican, Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), also bit his tongue. 

Thune did not object to Trump’s failure to brief top Senate chairs on the war. 

Thune had no comment even after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had described the president’s behavior as that of an “unhinged madman.” 

He had nothing to say even after Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R- Alaska) said she could not excuse the president’s threat to an entire civilization as “an attempt to gain leverage in negotiations with Iran…It endangers Americans both abroad and at home.” 

Thune and Johnson remained quiet even after the American pope, always reluctant to get into politics, spoke up and called Trump’s hyperbolic military threats “truly unacceptable.” 

To this day, the president has failed to offer the American public the reason for the war. Polls show there is no “rally-around-the-flag” support for this action.  

Republican inaction in Congress also pales in contrast with criticism from many of Trump’s backers in the world of right-wing social media. 

Here’s Alex Jones: “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” he asked on his InfoWars broadcast. 

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), one of Trump’s most loyal allies, wrote: “25TH AMENDMENT!!! … We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.” 

Candace Owens, another major voice on the right, called Trump’s recent declarations “beyond madness.”

Traditional Republican voices are also calling for Congress to act. The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page wrote critically that Trump’s “threats of unleashing ‘Hell,’ and an end to Iran’s ‘civilization,’ raised global fears and undermined support at home and abroad.” 

Similarly, David French, the New York Times columnist who is a conservative critic of Trump, said: “This is obvious 25th Amendment territory, but people are so desensitized that they can’t see it.”

This nest of instability in the Oval Office cannot be dismissed by accusing the president’s critics of engaging in what the right wing calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) seriously raised the possibility of Trump’s Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power. Pointing out that Trump’s own words amounted to intent to commit war crimes in Iran, Khanna said Congress needs to “look at all options to hold this president accountable.”

Now the test is how will Trump’s lack of stability impact global politics and economics? That damage already looks to be profound. The next presidential election is two and a half years away.  

Yet, congressional Republicans as well as Trump’s Cabinet are failing to answer the call for action, and there are no excuses for their inaction. 

Many of them are leaving Congress. Are they already preoccupied with concern about their post-Trump livelihoods?

They are failing the test they so gladly and with far less evidence put to the aging Biden. 

 Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”

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