Charles P. Pierce says go away already:
The Trump presidency is not an accident of history. Conservative politics has been moving toward something like it ever since Ronald Reagan declared that the national government was the problem. It has been enabled by a consistent trend toward civic disengagement, some of which was encouraged by ambitious men in the wake of Reagan’s success. And the genuine danger going forward is that the next ambitious American authoritarian will not be a half-bright bungler dancing on strings held by god-knows-which foreign autocrat or banker. The next one might be better at it. After all, the template has been established, and the Republican Party has demonstrated a taste for authoritarianism that history says is hard to shake. The Trump political template has to be crushed to dust so that it never rises again. Until it is, it remains a cancer on the republic that’s only in the most fragile remission.
It is time for all of them to go: Steve Bannon and his dreams of being the king of chaos, Reince Priebus and the other hapless throne-sniffers, the children with their many scams and their clearly unresolved Daddy issues—all of them. But, most of all, it is time for him to go. The anger of the marks whom he conned last November cannot be used to dodge the obligations that fall on politicians that know what their duty is, but still fail to do it. History demands a bit of courage every now and again.
Getting rid of Trump isn’t enough. We need to root out the local politicians who laid the groundwork for him with their holier-than-thou puritanism on school boards where they can ban transgender bathrooms with impunity, rally voters with gun raffles, label immigrants as criminals while paying them in cash to mow their lawns and raise their children, and go unchallenged for re-election because the local opposition party is too busy worrying about the national election.
Trump and Trumpism didn’t happen in a vacuum.
