Every day the President of the United States wakes up and binges on television, rage tweets about what he sees, and hopes the Fox & Friends geniuses will put his tweets up on the screen so he can see himself on the teevee. We have accepted this as a fact of life: the president is a Fox News Grandpa trapped in a symbiosis of stupid with a right-wing cable network that is continually melting his brain. Sometimes, if there's a big story in the news that he doesn't want people to talk about anymore, the President of the United States will accuse some people of TREASON. We have accepted this also.

For proof of concept, we can examine the Presidential Feed on this fine Friday. Having recorded a blast-from-the-past roast video about newly minted presidential candidate Bill de Blasio the night previous, the world's most powerful man awoke this morning and proceeded to rattle off Official Messages From the President about: the National Emergency at the border (remember that?), "bad hombres," how people he's giddy to deport shouldn't "get comfortable," a quick muse about whether Democrats will give "our Country" an immigration win, a Fox & Friends quote featuring "down goes Comey," and all-caps renditions of his genius-brain slogans. DRAIN THE SWAMP! says the man presiding over The Great American Heist.

But then it really began.

"New Fox Poll: 58% of people say that the FBI broke the law in investigating Donald J. Trump. @foxandfriends," the president tweeted, followed minutes later by: "My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on. Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!"

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New Fox Poll: 58% of people say that the FBI broke the law in investigating Donald J. Trump. @foxandfriends — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2019

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My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on. Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2019

So here you can see the president repeating a Fox News poll stat indicating more than half of the public thinks the FBI broke the law while investigating him and then, almost instantaneously, converting this into a definitive judgment before God and man: his campaign was CONCLUSIVELY spied on. Many people are saying it, which is the same thing as it being true. In conclusion, it was treason. TREASON! Throw them in jail!

Suddenly the "down goes Comey" line has a new resonance. After all, the President of the United States is now calling for those who led a perfectly legitimate investigation into him and his associates—one which found they certainly did know of and encourage Russia's meddling in the election for Trump's benefit, even if it did not rise to criminal conspiracy—to be thrown in jail as traitors to the republic. This falls right in line with his demands that his political opponents be investigated and jailed. This is a particular concern because he now as a pet toad for an attorney general who is exclusively doing interviews on his propaganda network, spreading the "spying" meme. (This is after William Barr sabotaged the public rollout of The Mueller Report to downplay that it clearly lays out multiple felonies the president committed, and was meant to serve as a referral to Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings.) The Justice Department is now a political weapon.

Trump and his pet toad pose a severe threat to our independent system of justice. Getty Images

It's also right in line with his (and his lawyers') new position that Congress has no right to investigate the president—the Constitution and its separation of powers be damned. This position is tantamount to saying the president is above the law and there can be no check on his power. They said Watergate was an illegitimate investigation! "When the president does it, it's not illegal." It's also right in line with his relentless assault on the free press, another institution of democracy capable of holding him accountable, which continued this Friday morning with a tweet about Iran that was not as reassuring as he might have believed when writing it.

Of course, ramping up the Spy talk might have something to do with last night's revelation that there is a voicemail tape of one of Trump's lawyers trying to influence onetime National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, part of what was apparently a pattern of attempts to prevent Flynn from cooperating with the investigation or to limit that cooperation. We shouldn't need the tape to acknowledge the obvious: the president broke the law repeatedly. But more than that, he is an aspiring autocrat who will destroy the pillars of our republic—the Constitution's separation of powers, an independent system of justice, a free press—to avoid the consequences of what he's done. It's not complicated. He must be removed before he can do so.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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