This week, the question of whether or not action may need to be taken under the provisions of the 25th Amendment to remove Biden from office showed up in The Hill. Granted, the article was an opinion piece written by health policy analyst Merrill Matthews of the Institute of Policy Innovation (who probably tends to lean a bit to the right), but it was still rather remarkable to see the headline appear at that outlet. And he offers plenty of evidence along with historical trends to back it up.

The time may be coming when the country will have to have a serious conversation about a very uncomfortable topic: President Biden’s mental health.

It’s a conversation the left and the media forced on the public during the Trump administration. Claims that President Trump was not mentally fit for the job and needed to be removed from office began in earnest right after his inauguration in 2017…

Biden’s issues are substantively different. We frequently see him, after he has delivered a speech, wander off as if he doesn’t know where he is or where he’s supposed to go. Someone hurries over and takes his arm and points him in the right direction.

At times he’s lucid and in control, but at other times he seems baffled and confused. It’s not unusual to see this behavior in older people, and Biden turns 80 this month.

Matthews makes a good point in noting that the Democrats may have set up this trap door for themselves. Leading Democratic officials and their obedient scribes in the mainstream media began questioning Donald Trump’s mental health even before he took office and the subject was widely debated for years.

It’s true that Donald Trump could at times be (as Matthews puts it) “unpredictable, moody, temperamental, undisciplined and occasionally downright crude.” But none of that adds up to some sort of cognitive disorder so much as just a person with an irascible temperament. Trump even took a cognitive test and had the results released to the public, something the current President has declined to do. What’s going on with Joe Biden’s behavior is something else entirely.

But we’ve known about this since before Biden took office, right? The thing was that you just weren’t supposed to talk about it. There’s nothing wrong with good old Joe. He just has an occasional stuttering problem and you’re an ableist if you point it out! (Spoiler alert: it’s not a stutter.) But now the subject is being talked about openly, even among some of Biden’s most ardent media defenders. Even the New York Times was getting in on the action this week.

This trend is all the more baffling because it’s happening within a handful of days of the midterm elections. Why? One possibility is that the Democrats are realizing as a group that they need to stop Biden from announcing a bid for a second term. Not only does he seem to be cognitively challenged, but he’s barely more popular than the coronavirus at the moment. Easing him quietly off the stage would be far preferable to a nasty primary fight among the Democrats next year, and spreading rumors of some 25th Amendment action might send a strong enough signal for him to change his mind. (Or at least for his handlers to change it for him.)

The other thing that might nudge Biden away from another run would be an impeachment attempt. The Democrats also opened the door to that possibility with all of their shenanigans against Trump, and Biden has given us more than a few reasons to potentially try (and fail) to impeach him. I really don’t want to see the GOP drag everyone through that, but it may be unavoidable. But no matter where all of this chatter is coming from, it’s looking more and more as if someone is going to find a way to keep Biden from going for a second term, assuming he even makes it all the way through his first four years.