IT IS TIME FOR DONALD TRUMP TO LEAVE THE WHITE HOUSE

The other day, Michelle Goldberg, writing in Slate, made this excellent point: In response to the argument that ridding the country of President* Donald Trump only would worsen the political polarization in the country, perhaps to the point of actual widespread violence, Goldberg argued that, if we're making decisions of national policy based on that criterion, then we're already very far down a long, dark road that leads, inevitably, to a beer hall in Munich.

It really is time for him to go.

I've spent five months dodging the notion that the Trump presidency* is something with which the Republic should dispense itself. The only legitimate mechanisms for doing so—impeachment and the implementation of the 25th amendment—seemed to me to be clunky and inadequate and, anyway, the Republicans in Washington clearly had no stomach for either one of them, since they seemed eager to bargain away an adequate national government in exchange for the retrograde plutocracy of their dreams.

Consider that, while all these Russian bombshells were bursting with monotonous regularity, the Republicans in the Senate seem poised to ram through the destruction of the Affordable Care Act, and the Republicans in the House are preparing to wreck the Dodd-Frank regulations by passing what I believe is called the Let's Have Another Global Financial Disaster Act of 2017. This doesn't mean that the Russia investigations are "distractions." It means that threats to a self-governing democratic republic are coming from several directions. There's no rule that says that can't happen.