In May, 2017, some in the higher reaches of the justice Department, including Rod Rosenstein and Andy McCabe, became alarmed when President Trump fired James Comey. The FBI he led was trying to determine whether anyone in the Trump campaign has aided and abetted a Russian cyberattack designed to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump. The firing looked fishy.

Was Trump trying to cover up collaboration? Was the President a dupe or a Russian asset? He had, for instance, said he believed Putin’s denial of any cyberattack in preference to the combined warnings of the nation’s intelligence services. And he had tried to persuade investigators to ignore potentially criminal behavior by Michal Flynn and other campaign participants who had suspicious contacts with Russia.

The Justice men around the table also wondered if Trump, even if innocent, lacked the “capacity” to be president. They considered whether the 25th Amendment could be invoked to remove Trump. Added to the constitution in 1967, the 25th clarified some loose ends about executive succession.

It codified what to do if a president or vice president died in office or resigned, if a president decides he is “unable to discharge his duties,” and most alarmingly what to do if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet or of the Congress believe the president is unable to do his job. In the event of the last contingency, they can vote to remove him.

Adding such an amendment was probably overdue in 1967 since in the previous 50 years a president had suffered a stroke leaving the government to be run in secret by his wife, another was a dying man in the middle of a World War whose “capacity” at the end might have been questioned, a third had a series of heart attacks, and another was assassinated.

Since then the 25th has been invoked for a presidential resignation, and several times for medical procedures during which presidents were sedated and unable to act. When Trump learned that Justice Department personnel had discussed invoking the amendment, he called it a coup and treason.

It was always a far-fetched notion that Vice President Pence and a majority of the cabinet or Congress would agree, but the fact that it was discussed is a measure of how worrisome counter-terrorism officials found Trump’s behavior.

Today, though there’s plenty of talk about impeaching Trump for obstruction of justice and behaving more like a Russian partisan than an American patriot, no one has seriously raised the idea of invoking the 25th amendment again. And yet, a sort of covert alternative to the 25th seems to be in operation.

We learned this week that the U.S. Cyber Command has dramatically “stepped up digital incursions into Russia’s power grid.” Why? To make trouble? No, rather to belatedly respond to trouble. The Russians have installed malware in U.S. power plants, oil and gas pipelines and water utilities so that a massive nationwide program of disruptive sabotage can be launched at any time.

There has also been mounting evidence that Russia is preparing their next cyberattack on the 2020 elections. Thus, the Cyber Command appears to be mad as hell and to have decided we aren’t going to take it anymore. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the cyber warriors in the Pentagon and our intelligence services have the same sorts of worries that Rosenstein, McCabe, and the other Justice Department leaders had in 2017. They have “a broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the probability that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials”

There is ample precedent, given his willingness to trust Putin over our intelligence services and the fact that in 2017 he revealed classified details of an operation in Syria to the Russian Foreign Minister.

In short, Pentagon and Intelligence personnel decided Trump was, in the words of the 25th Amendment,’ “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” without endangering the security of the country. Since invoking the amendment would have no chance of succeeding and was above the pay grade of the leaders of the military-intelligence complex, they simply decided to take countermeasures against Russia while keeping the Commander-in-Chief out of the loop.

This is a rather worrisome revelation, and it is far from being a one-off. Many senior government employees have fled the Trump wrecking ball in sorrow, but there is reason to believe many in numerous departments — Homeland Security, Interior, Energy, Commerce, Treasury, Health and Human Services — are keeping calm and carrying on with programs, studies, analyses, operations that Trump is not informed about because he might countermand or eliminate them.

Trump worshippers would regard this as the nefarious deep state at work. Those who believe vital government operations affecting the health and well-being of the citizens and the security of the country are endangered by reckless, ill-informed, zealots carrying out actions of dubious legality think they have a duty to curb such vandalism. Desperate maladies call for desperate remedies, as Hippocrates said.

Neither alternative is attractive. but when you are under attack by enemies foreign, and possibly domestic, wait and see is an even less reassuring solution. It is worth noting this is the Executive branch at odds with itself. The Judicial and Legislative branches, that might be relied on to mitigate the mess, are largely AWOL. It’s a hell of a way to run a constitutional democracy.