The greater danger is not that Trump will be retained, but that he will be toppled.
If the concern is genuinely for the Republic, for the continuation of our constitutional experiment, the greatest peril we could face is not a bad president, but the rejection of an election.
The precedent sent by a successful coup of harassment would forever destabilize the presidency and empower revolutions and resistances every four years. It would strike an ax to the very root of the nation and its nature.
It would, simply put, end the Constitution. Just as there is a balance of powers, there must be a retention of powers -- to include the power of persistence in the presidency, and the power of the people to constitutionally select the president.
I fear that those who batter Trump and make hysterical claims -- who spread the gasoline and light the match of social disunion and potentially violent revolution -- are either ignorant of the damage they do or secretly in league to bring down the nation as we know it.
If the Obama Administration brought change via one means, the progressive rejection of the presidential election is seeking to bring change by another means. It is either a woefully misdirected political stunt, or it is a coup and a revolution meant to destroy the nation of 1776 and 1789.
If it is the latter, no words will make a difference in the actions of those storming the Bastille. But if it is the former, hopefully reason and love of country can prevail.
And reason tells us that we can survive a bad president.
If Trump is the dolt and crook his harshest critics claim, if he is completely unsuited to the office, we must have faith that our constitutional system will endure him -- as it has endured such failed presidents in the past. Our ignorance of our own history makes us forget the presidencies and failings of men like James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and John Tyler. Andrew Johnson was inept, Ulysses Grant was surrounded by bribery and graft, even John Kennedy was wildly compromised by personal indiscretion.
Yet in each situation of presidential weakness or venality, the Constitution, and the
commitment of people of both parties to follow it, got us through. The Republic was preserved though the men running it were failed.
Chasing Trump out, clamoring for impeachment or election overturn, is not primarily an attack upon him, it is an attack upon the Constitution which put him in office, and upon the suffrage and liberty of the half of the population that lawfully elected him. You are not taking down a man or a party, you are taking down a country.
And you are doing it for partisan advantage.
You may be proving George Washington's point that loyalty to political party would surpass and endanger loyalty to country and Constitution.
The Constitution handles a failed executive and lost elections nicely. It hems a bad president in with checks and balances, and it offers a defeated party the recourse of a congressional election just two years away. Those are the tools the progressives should use in this situation.
To insist on some extra-constitutional outcome, some harranging of the nation into upset and conflict, some manipulation of the press to create crises and convulsions, is to force a permanent solution onto a temporary problem.
You can have presidential elections repeatedly, but you can only break a country once.
And chasing Trump from office, especially so quickly and so politically, will break the country.
It will defy constitutional order, and it will disenfranchise some 150 million people -- that half of the country whose political philosophy is closest to Trump's. Those people will react forcefully, potentially even violently. Not riot, but revolution.
And even if they don't, the precedent set will nullify any president election this country might ever hold again. If the example is that political activism and press manipulation can overturn a lawful election, than no election will ever be respected or accepted again. If the Democratic Party disavows a Republican victory, and uses social disorder to negate it, then the losing political party in any national election will forever do the same thing.
And America will stop being America.
And maybe that's what they want. Maybe this is about undoing the uniquely American Constitution and its concept of individual liberty, and replacing it with the global progressive goal of collective governance and central socialist rule.
Maybe it's about killing the beast so they can pick its bones.
If so, they're going the right direction.
If it's not, we need to change course soon.
Trust the Constitution, even if it put your opponent in office.
Even if it put Trump in office.