Republicans: You must impeach President Trump

Trump has only been president for two weeks. In that time, he has created untold chaos with hyper-aggressive use of executive authority, and seriously destabilized relations with several nations, including at least one very close ally, Australia. He's unstable, incompetent, and a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and the world.

Donald Trump must be impeached and removed from office. Not because his policy is bad, though that is very true, but because he is so erratic and unstable as to be a threat to all life on Earth. And it will be up to Congressional Republicans to do it.

They are the only ones with the power to impeach Trump at this point (which requires a majority vote in the House to impeach and a two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict and remove from office). The reason they should is not to advance liberal political goals — if anything Vice President Mike Pence would be a more effective policymaker and a more formidable candidate in 2020 — but because of Trump's actual danger to American society.

Let's roll the tape.

Trump, on the close counsel of Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller (who are, it seems, the real power behind the throne), has rammed through a probably illegal order banning Muslim immigration from seven countries, even for people with legitimate visas and desperately ill refugees; he reportedly directed federal law enforcement to ignore federal court orders staying the act, creating an instant constitutional crisis. Over the weekend, Trump and his national security team ordered a raid in Yemen which was epically botched, killing at least 30 people including one U.S. soldier and 10 women and children — among them an 8-year-old American girl.

This week, Trump reportedly threatened to invade Mexico to deal with "bad hombres" (though the constantly bullied Mexican government later denied it); and he got in a bizarre, heated argument with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over an agreement to take in some refugees. On Wednesday night, after a handful of anti-fascist protesters disrupted a Milo Yiannopolous event at the University of California, Berkeley, Trump threatened to withdraw all federal funding from the entire school:

On Thursday, Trump put Iran "ON NOTICE" because they carried out a ballistic missile test. That same day, it came out that Trump had hired Michael Anton, author of a widely-read pseudonymous essay supporting Trump, to work in national security. His article is overtly racist and authoritarian in its reasoning; it casts any Democratic victory as presumptively illegitimate because "the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle."

In related news, Trump is also reportedly considering altering a Department of Homeland Security anti-terrorism program to focus solely on Islamist terrorism — mere days after a white nationalist terrorist shot up a mosque in Quebec City. Oh, and Bannon says we'll be at war with China within 10 years.

I wrote many articles predicting that Trump was a racist and an incipient fascist, that he would be the worst president in American history, and on and on. But I did not think it would get quite so bad this fast. If you ever wanted to see a presidency run by an unstable numskull who gets 100 percent of his news from Fox News broadcasts, here we have it.

And all this doesn't even touch the background issue of Trump's immense network of business ties which he was already exploiting for his own enrichment before he was inaugurated. That alone — a clear-cut violation of the Emoluments Clause — is probably grounds enough for impeachment, if we needed any more.

Trump is popular among Republican voters. But he is very unpopular overall, and his antics are creating a massive popular backlash. And while congressional Republicans are hawkish on Iran, they weren't much for war with China last time I checked. Trump has been president for literally two weeks and he has already caused one major international crisis and several serious diplomatic flaps for no reason at all. What will happen when he faces a real problem? The United States has about 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads that can be fired anywhere on the sole discretion of the president. The man is quite literally a threat to human life on this planet. He has to go.

by Ryan Cooper