Well-known media and leftist personalities are engaging in what appears to be a Soviet-style campaign to remove the president from office. The “Trump-Russia” effort has failed to garner productive results, so the legacy media and the Left have moved on to questioning the president’s mental capacities, without providing evidence that there is anything medically wrong with President Trump.

On Tuesday, reporters asked the White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, 22 separate questions concerning the president’s mental state. It’s unclear why these questions are warranted in the first place. Sure, the president has a unique personality and has a flair for drama, but he has shown no signs of any type of mental illness that would stop the duly elected president from carrying out his executive duties. Time and again, Dr. Jackson had to repeat himself in declaring that President Trump was fully fit for office, both cognitively and physically.

The Soviets devised a system that allowed for political figures — especially those who posed a threat to party leaders — to be declared mentally unfit for office. To combat unsavory political opinions, Soviet leaders from Nikita Kruschev to Yuri Andropov called on friendly psychiatrists to diagnose dissidents as mentally incapacitated. Some dissidents were then sent to a psikhushka (mental hospital), where they were imprisoned and removed from political life. The pseudo-psychiatry establishment — which in effect acted as an ideological policing agency — continued until the fall of the Soviet Union. However, the practice has re-emerged in China and other authoritarian states.

Earlier this month, the media breathlessly reported on a Yale psychiatrist, Dr. Bandy Lee, who briefed lawmakers and warned (without performing a personal evaluation) of the “dangers that [President Trump’s] mental instability poses on the nation.” Outlets like CNN, Vox, Politico, Newsweek, and countless others were happy to promote the message. Lee later deleted her social media accounts after refusing to answer questions about her political motives.

The campaign continued with the publication of pseudo-journalist Michael Wolff’s half-fiction book about the Trump presidency.

But Dr. Lee and Wolff are far from the only people to leverage their positions to claim that there is overwhelming evidence that the president is mentally unstable. Media figures have relentlessly pursued wild conspiracy theories about the president’s mental capacities.

Without evidence that there is anything particular wrong, CNN’s Jake Tapper, NBC’s Chuck Todd, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, and other media figures are now regularly asking about the president’s mental health.

Of course, the Left probably doesn’t intend to lock away President Trump in a Soviet-style insane asylum. But many are quite serious about their intention to remove the president from office. They’ve taken to leveraging shoddy, unproven, politically motivated psychiatric diagnoses made from afar to terminate the president’s authority through the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.

The 25th Amendment was enacted following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It was established as a means to ensure presidential succession, should the elected president be physically incapacitated. Jay Berman, the former chief of staff to Sen. Birch Bayh (who played a major role in writing the amendment) has made it very clear that the 25th Amendment does not apply to questions about the president’s mental capacities. Politico reports that constitutional scholars agree almost unanimously that this is how the 25th Amendment should be applied.

Fanatical anti-Trump voices have abandoned faith in the electoral system. They simply refuse to accept the fact that the president is capable of carrying out his duties and should be allowed to serve out his term (or terms) in office. “Trump-Russia” was a dud, so now “mental illness” is their new means to force what amounts to a coup attempt to remove the elected president of the United States.