The president is having an actual mental breakdown. Will the vice president take action?

Donald Trump's insomniac, messianic, and apocalyptic ravings are causing alarm in Washington. It's time for the VP to have some serious conversations.

Here’s a thought experiment: if your boss is a danger to himself and other people, who do you go to first? His family? His friends? The police? And what if your boss is the president of the United States?

JD Vance should be asking himself these questions.

Sunday night into Monday morning, the president of the United States conducted an all-night social media binge that would alarm any reasonable observer, whether or not he was the president, and which cemented a growing sense of dread about Trump’s mental stability.

It began at 9:03 p.m. with a savage, 334-word screed against Pope Leo XIV, attacking the first American-born pontiff as “WEAK” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.”

It continued at 9:49 p.m. with an AI-generated image of Trump depicted as Jesus Christ, seemingly blessing a sick man.

A minute later, a picture of Trump Tower on the moon.

A political meme at 10:10.

News clips at 10:32 and 10:53.

Then, at 12:43 a.m., the president announced the United States would impose a naval blockade on the Strait of Hormuz — the very same blockade he’d condemned Iran for imposing — and which he directed via social media in the dead of night.

He kept going: 2:35 a.m., an article about Joe Biden.

2:36 a.m., the naval blockade again.

2:37 a.m., an article about Rep. Eric Swalwell.

2:37 a.m., the same Biden article, again.

2:38 a.m., a piece about his White House ballroom.

4:10 a.m., a news article about Iran.

Democrat influencer Harry Sisson was among the first to sound the alarm about the frenzied posting spree, writing:

“He’s not sleeping, he’s pretending to be Jesus, and he’s posting all night. He’s not well.”

Harry is right. Trump is not well.

In fact, pair this insomniac all-nighter with Trump’s recent apocalyptic rhetoric — his warning last week that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not capitulate, and his threat of “complete decimation” if peace talks fell apart — and you have an alarming picture of historic proportions. A commander-in-chief threatening genocide and spending his nights posting grandiose self-flattery and ordering military actions while most of the military is sleeping.

The Iran talks did, in fact, fall apart over the weekend. U.S.-Iran negotiations in Pakistan ended without agreement after a 21-hour session, with Vice President JD Vance coming back empty handed. That collapse appears to have sent the president into freefall. His much-hoped-for ceasefire has crumbled, after Trump himself seems to have been trying to micro-manage the outcome from afar, to no avail. And in the vacuum, Trump is not marshaling his Cabinet or addressing the nation. He is posting manically, unable to control himself.

Perhaps the most frightening dimension of what we witnessed last night was that Trump’s apocalyptic warnings have merged with a messianic self-image. Literally. He’s continuing to reinforce the view that he is the Messiah.

In the days before Easter, Trump seemed to relish comparisons between himself and Jesus Christ during what was supposed to be a closed-door Easter lunch at the White House. Last night he posted an AI-generated image casting himself literally as the Christian savior, less than an hour after he attacked the leader of the Catholic Church in language no American president has ever used against a sitting pope.

Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he was “disheartened that the President chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father,” adding pointedly that the pope “is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.” Three of the country’s senior-most cardinals issued a joint rebuke. Pope Leo himself said he had “no fear of the Trump administration” and vowed to continue speaking out against the war.

The man being attacked as weak and un-Christian is the Catholic Pope. The man doing the attacking is posting pictures of himself as Jesus Christ. Can you imagine if Barack Obama did this? Or Joe Biden? Or any American president in history?

This is the moment when those around Donald Trump should probably stop telling themselves the same ludicrous self-assuring lies that I’ve heard them tell for years — that this is some kind of performance or 3D chess or chaos-as-method — when it’s really just scary. What we’re seeing is an elderly man coming apart in public, with nuclear weapons at his disposal.

Which brings me to JD Vance.

Just two weeks ago, Vance announced that he will publish a book titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, due out June 16. The book explores his conversion to the Catholic faith and what it means to be a Christian across all of the seasons of his life. “I’m a Christian,” Vance said proudly in announcing the book, “and I became a Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ’s teachings are true.”

He flew home from Islamabad Sunday afternoon (34 hours of travel and 16 hours of failed negotiations behind him), to find his boss had spent the night attacking his Pope, mocking his faith, and casting himself in the role of JD’s lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

If this isn’t a sufficient wake-up call to the Vice President of the United States, then his spine is, indeed, made of chocolate pudding.

To be fair, Vance’s constitutional toolkit is limited. The vice presidency is a sparse portfolio with little more power than the president’s bag boy. He can preside over the Senate, cast tie-breaking votes occasionally, and stand in readiness waiting for his boss to drop dead. That’s about it, other than whatever the president tells him to do. The framers, in their wisdom or their naïveté, did not design the office to restrain an unraveling president. Vance has no formal authority to tell his boss to put down the phone at 2 a.m. or to take a breather before threatening genocide.

I know this dynamic intimately, because I watched it destroy Mike Pence.

In the Trump years, I came to believe that Pence represented one of the great moral failures of modern American political life. He stood in the Oval Office through some of the most alarming episodes of the Trump presidency — including sickening abuses of power, monologues about cruelty, and obviously illegal demands — and did nothing about it. Just stood there. I saw it more than a few times. His straight-backed posture and beatific gaze. Silent as a portrait. I meant what I later wrote:

“Pence [will] be remembered for an erect posture and flaccid conscience. He stood proudly next to the chief executive but never stood up to him. He was built to obey.”

But I have come to regard my earlier judgment as incomplete. Because when it truly mattered (when Trump was engineering a violent assault on the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history), Mike Pence did actually stand up. He walked into that Capitol on January 6th knowing what was coming and certified the election anyway, despite the president’s demand that he break the law. He protected the Constitution. And in doing so, he may well have saved the Republic.

Whatever his failings, Pence earned that day. It washed away his civic sins.

This is such a moment for JD Vance.

The president was not merely eccentric or impulsive last night. He showed the signs of genuine psychological deterioration, the kind which requires no medical degree to observe. If I’d witnessed a relative experiencing that kind of sleeplessness, grandiosity, messianic projection, impulse to attack, and absurdity, I would be calling the nursing home at 9 a.m. Vance is not some bystander to this. He is, constitutionally and politically, the first person in the line of succession.

The vice president has the obligation to act. So if his powers are limited, what should he actually do?

I don’t imagine he will do anything. But he should. And if there’s a chance that his conscience was finally awoken, then here’s my personal recommendation. Keep in mind, this is the minimum course of action.

First, Vance should convene a private meeting with a small number of Cabinet members, including at least he Secretaries of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Treasury. This wouldn’t be to plot a “coup” but to establish a shared understanding of what they’re witnessing and what their collective responsibilities are in the event the president asks them to exceed their authorities and do something terrible. I’ve already made clear my deepest doubts that Trump’s team would ever invoke the 25th Amendment, but they have a duty to discuss what’s happening.

Second, Vance should reach out privately to senior congressional leaders — at least in the GOP — to privately voice his concerns and begin building the political architecture that would be necessary if conditions worsen. The Congress has oversight responsibilities, and its leaders deserve to know what Vance knows. He should say to Speaker Mike Johnson: “You see what I see? The president is unwell. We need to be prepared to keep him from doing something dangerous.”

Third, and most critically, Vance should go to the president directly. This should be a private conversation, man to man, in which the vice president delivers an honest assessment that that the president’s behavior is alarming senior officials and could destabilize his whole presidency.

Let’s be honest, this won’t go well. In fact, a conversation like that probably leads Trump to lash out and double down on the madness, including threatening to jettison his vice president. But you know what? That’s exactly what JD Vance needs right now to prove his point to Cabinet members and Congressional leaders — that Trump is prepared to rip off the brakes as he’s speeding toward a cliff. That’s what it would signal if he tried to get rid of the one man who has the constitutional role to step in.

I know what you’re thinking. There’s no chance JD Vance does anything like this. To be honest, I felt the same way about Mike Pence. But in the end, I was wrong. So I would submit to you that there’s a possibility there, however remote, that the vice president might rise to this occasion. I’m not even suggesting Vance break with him publicly, for goodness sake. At the barest minimum, he just needs to be the adult in the room and tell the president that his behavior could destroy him and all of us.

The Pope that Trump just attack responded with five words: I have no fear.

The question for JD Vance is simpler: do you?

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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