When Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama warned last year that Donald Trump was unfit to control the U.S. nuclear arsenal, it wasn’t partisan campaign trail hyperbole, but rather a point of nearly global consensus. Nuclear deterrence experts said that his presidency would slightly but meaningfully—and thus unacceptably—increase the risk of a miscue, and even Trump’s supporters seemed to understand as much. The psychotic, but influential pro-Trump treatise “The Flight 93 Election” began with a stark admission.

“2016 is the Flight 93 election,” wrote Micheal Anton, who has gone on to serve in a senior national security role in the Trump administration. “[C]harge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.”

Trump may destroy the world, in other words, but that’s better than another few years of liberal rule. Nobody needs to love liberalism to grasp, a year later, that this cost-benefit analysis was demented, and that the country made an error in embracing the logic, wittingly or otherwise. Now, as Trump makes unhinged threats to begin a nuclear war against North Korea, those who deluded themselves into taking a flyer on the Trump presidency no longer have any excuse for ignoring what’s been plain all along: It is not remotely safe for him to hold this office.

Politicians like to frame their agendas in terms of the ways policies will shape the world they’ll leave behind to future generations. Conservatives (who don’t actually care about federal debt, but whatever) promote the retrenchment of the welfare state by describing it as the source of unsustainable debts our “children and grandchildren” will have have to pay down. Nearly everyone else treats global warming in essentially the same way. The risks of climate inaction will mushroom in the future, making it immoral for the masters of today’s universe to be indifferent to greenhouse gas emissions.

The right’s embrace of Flight 93 thinking has accelerated this generational logic, but only as it applies to the policy end of removing Trump from office. It was overwhelmingly old people who handed Trump the power to end all life on the planet, against the overwhelming wishes of people who will inherit it from them. Young people don’t simply regard Trump as a less-than-ideal steward of their futures, but as a poison forced upon them by elders who have disclaimed any responsibility for bequeathing their offspring a bright and kind and healthy civic life. In exchange for this darkened future, Trump’s enablers were promised everything from lower taxes (financed by cutting health care for younger people) to culture war to a nonspecific assault on the political establishment.