Elections have consequences.

Nothing has brought that reality home like Donald Trump’s nightmarish reign. He has to be stopped. It is not hyperbole to wonder what, if anything, will be left of our American system after three more years, much less eight, of Trumpism.

Millions of us understand this. But we also need to understand and embrace the most important lessons from the past two years:

• Under our Constitutional system, most of the consequences of Trump’s election can only be altered by future elections.
• There is very little in the current law that ensures that the Chief Executive will always put the country before him or herself.
• The Republican party has become a radical, far-right, white-supremacist party that favors authoritarianism if not full-blown fascism.
• Donald Trump has the unwavering support of the vast majority of Republican voters, and they will continue to support him—no matter what he does.
• Republican voters have embraced an alternate reality that makes their political choices seem illogical and at times suicidal to us. But it doesn’t seem that way to them.
• Republicans currently serving in Congress will not turn against Trump, no matter what he does, even if this makes their reelection less likely. To be reelected they first need to be renominated, and any Republican who turns against Trump will face a vicious primary challenge that they will likely lose.
• Fox News is a full-blown propaganda outlet—not for the Republican Party, but for Trump--that still has enormous influence. Sinclair Media is headed in that direction.

And we all need to understand the realities underlying the Mueller investigation:

• Mueller cannot remove Trump from office. Only Congress can do that.
• We don’t know whether Mueller believes that he can indict a sitting President. The last ruling on this by the DOJ held that this is not possible. Mueller may give that decision over to his superiors in the DOJ. Sources say that the Mueller team plans on sending Rod Rosenstein several reports over the next year summarizing their findings in the different areas of their investigation. Those reports may be designed to give guidance to Rosenstein on whether or not there is a case for indicting Trump and others. Rosenstein would own the decision on what to do with these reports, including on whether or not they should be published or kept secret, and whether Trump could be indicted.
• Mueller is partnering with other DOJ teams and the attorneys general of at least two states.
• If Rosenstein is fired, Trump can replace him with a Trump loyalist and order that person to end or impede Mueller’s investigation.
• There is no statute, as there was during Watergate, requiring that if Mueller is fired he must be replaced by another special counsel.
• If Mueller and/or Rosenstein are fired, the state attorneys general who they have been partnering with can continue to prosecute crimes committed in their states, such as money laundering, bank fraud, and so forth.
• If Mueller and/or Rosenstein are fired, a DOJ run by Trump loyalists could quash Mueller’s investigations into Federal crimes by Trump that could serve as the compelling basis for impeachment (specifically, the obstruction of justice probe) and decide not to publish any of Mueller’s reports.

That brings us to what our national politics will look like over the next two and half years. I have been proven to be a very poor political prognosticator, but I don't believe that the next two years will resemble the Watergate era:

• Trump will fire Rosenstein and/or Mueller, and soon. Rosenstein is telling friends that he is at peace with the likelihood that he will be fired, and there are reports that the White House is preparing a rationale for that firing. Mueller is working hard to finish his report on the obstruction of justice issue as soon as possible. Trump will not want that report falling into the hands of Rosenstein, so he will replace him ASAP with a Trump loyalist who will ensure that the report is never published and who he can order to shut down the investigation.
• The Republicans in Congress will do NOTHING about the firing of Rosenstein and/or Mueller. It’s possible that the Senate Intelligence committee will continue to investigate, but that is not at all comparable to the charter or expertise of Mueller’s team.
• Some patriots in Mueller’s office, the DOJ, and the FBI will protest and attempt to preserve records, but without the support of the Republican administration and the Republican Congress they will not be successful in keeping the investigation going and will instead leak those documents and records to the press.
• Trump, the Republicans, and Fox News will step up their efforts to completely destroy the credibility of the DOJ and the FBI. (Those efforts, only a year old, have already been extremely successful. Seventy percent of Republicans feel that Mueller has not been fair, and only fifty-two percent of all American feel that the investigation has been even handed.)
• Trump will issue blanket pardons for his family members, faithful supporters, those already indicted by Mueller, and, if necessary, for himself. The Scooter Libby pardon is a dress rehearsal for a standard in which anyone convicted of lying to the FBI will be pardoned based on the claim that the FBI is an unlawful, rogue agency. The members of the Trump gang who actually go to prison will be those already indicted by Mueller and those convicted of state crimes, for which Trump can’t issue pardons.
• The Democrats will win back the House by a solid margin in the November midterms, but they will not win the Senate.
• The new Democratic House will impeach Trump and send him to the Senate for trial. This only requires a majority vote.
• Trump will not be convicted and removed from office by the Senate. That requires 67 yes votes, which is an impossibility. If all Senate Democrats and the independents vote for impeachment (which is no sure thing—it would require actual political courage for Tester, Manchin, McCaskill, Heitkamp, and Jones to vote yes), 15 Republicans would have to vote yes as well. Congress will never remove Trump from office during his first term.
• Trump will likewise never be removed via Article 25, which would require that his Cabinet will turn on him--another political impossibility.
• Trump will be renominated by the Republican Party in 2020.
• Trump should never be underestimated. Conversely, the Democratic Party should never be overestimated. It’s possible that Trump could win reelection in 2020.

We have met our savior. It’s not our current laws regulating President power and behavior. It’s not the stellar work of Robert Mueller. It’s not the leadership of the Department of Justice or the FBI—the independents in those agencies will soon be gone, and there is no rule of law when there is no enforcement. It’s not the Republican Party. It’s not the Democratic Party. It’s not the news media, although they will help. It’s not the religious community.

It’s us, and only us. To paraphrase Trump, we alone can fix it.

Getting rid of Trump will not be easy and will require, but it is definitely possible, and it’s essential to the survival of our Constitutional system. Our success in destroying Trumpism is in no way assured. To be successful we will have to focus on the 2018 and 2020 elections and stop living vicariously through MSNBC, put aside the seductive opium dreams about Robert Mueller, Article 25, and impeachment with the help of the nonexistent moderate Republicans, and step up and do the hard work, for over two years, by ourselves:

• The day that Trump fires Rosenstein or Miller, we need to take our millions of bodies and voices and put them in the streets and in the legislative offices. We need to show our strength by marching, demonstrating, and sitting in---peacefully but loudly—until the 2020 elections.
• We need to work hard on behalf of progressive Democrats at every level in every state in the primaries this year and complete the takeover of that party that Sanders nearly achieved in 2016.
• We need to apply the methodology and tactics of the Indivisible movement to our work in the elections to ensure that all politics is local in 2018 and that we don’t blindly accept candidates anointed by the Democratic National Committee and so our candidates can generate their own funding independent of the DNC.
• After the primaries, we need to work tirelessly to elect Democrats to Congress and state and local offices—top to bottom—in November. If you think the best thing to do in 2018 is to stay home because your candidate didn’t win the primary or to vote for a third party, you are helping Trump. This may be the election that determines whether we still have a republic to debate about, so please spare us your obscene, sanctimonious bullshit about the Democrats being just as bad as the Republicans, or at least get the hell out of the way while the rest of us focus on destroying Trumpism.
• When the Democrats regain control of the House, we need to ensure that progressives are appointed to leadership positions, that progressive legislation is brought forward, and that Democratic Congressional committee chairs use their subpoena and investigative power to expose the corruption of the Trump gang, defeat their agenda, and restore the rule of law in this country.

If we rise to this challenge and do the work, like our parents and grandparents did during their time, the payoff will be profound. We will remove Trump and his gang from power and end their nightmare reign. We will effectively destroy the racist, authoritarian version of the Republican Party and reinvent the Democratic Party as the face of progressivism. We will all have the life-changing experience of working successfully together with millions of other Americans to save our system of government, which will in turn inject new life into that system.

The alternative is unthinkable.