Trump's actions in Syria and Afghanistan and Mattis's exit changed my mind. I had previously assumed that Kelly and Mattis were able to stop Trump from doing stupid things to the military, but it's clear that no one can and no one in his cabinet has the will to remove him either.
Trump also seems to have open contempt for the military brass now, which is not going to end well.
It will take Republicans to impeach Donald trump, just as it took Republicans to start acting as if they were ready to impeach Nixon. With Nixon it was bad behavior, and not ideology. Americans generally liked Nixon's ideology to the end of his Presidency They also recognized that someone else could be the torch-bearer of a coherent ideology, basically an attempt to meld Eisenhower-era conservatism with right-wing populism then held by most Southern Democrats.
Impeachment will not renounce the ideology of Donald Trump. It will impeach Donald Trump the person. It will also protect whatever credibility the Republican Party still has. I am satisfied that Mike Pence, the elected successor (unless he should resign in disgrace or otherwise exit the Vice-Presidency) is even more fanatically right-wing than Donald Trump. He is less crazy, apparently showing no signs of aggressive dementia. You can trust that I know what aggressive dementia is -- someone who once had control over executive functions loses the inhibitions that he once had and becomes violent and abusive as he had never been before. On the other hand, he is a nasty person, the sort of person who wants a Protestant fundamentalist version of Iran -- a plutocratic, theocratic, and of course repressive, hierarchical, and anti-egalitarian order.
The bright side is that Mike Pence would lose to just about any Democratic opponent in 2020. His treatment as a commencement speech at the fervently-Catholic University of Notre Dame University shows the contempt that Catholics have for him as a lapsed Catholic who proudly stands for an anti-Catholic and anti-intellectual
Weltanschauung. Note that the Catholic Church is mostly liberal, humanist, and respectful of learning, as is Notre Dame University. Mike Pence is hostile to all those. The only connection that he has to Notre Dame is that he was Governor of Indiana, the state in which Notre Dame is. So he is from Indiana -- but what the heck? So is former KKK leader Tom Metzger, still a fascist pig!
Mike Pence would be the perfect nominee of the Republican Party... to lose Florida, Texas, and even Louisiana, all of which have large Catholic populations. He would lose Maine and New Hampshire by blowout margins.
The dark side is that Mike Pence is no less authoritarian than Donald Trump. He might be less erratic about the military and intelligence service, but he might try to get them to push the tenets of Protestant fundamentalism onto the military as a culture (Young-earth creationism, 'reality' of the Biblical Flood, denial of evolution, and perhaps David Barton's pseudo-history that suggests that America was founded upon Biblical principles) onto the military as a culture and into K-12 education (Betsy DeVos would still be Secretary of Education). Roman Catholicism is hostile to superstition and pseudoscience as are liberal non-Catholics. Mike Pence is the understudy.
The intellectual basis of Trumpism remains intellectual quackery in the service of an authoritarian world-view, something contrary to what a majority of Americans hold. America may still be a conservative country in many respects, especially in its rejection of socialism in even its mildest forms. America is too diverse (it is more Catholic than anything else) to fit some Protestant fundamentalist dream.
