The Mueller probe, with its indictments of Trump associates for offenses unrelated to its ostensible mandate, combined with mendacious media coverage of President Trump, is an obvious attempt to restore the old order that the electorate rejected in 2016. It seeks to annul the will of the voters and return us to the incipient authoritarianism that germinated during the Obama era, and which the ruling class expected to blossom under Clinton. The bureaucrats who support the restoration of Beltway despotism call themselves public servants, yet despise the public. The politicians who support it call themselves Democrats, yet despise democracy.

The most important fact to absorb about all this is counterintuitive: The primary target isn’t really the President. Mueller and his apologists know Trump is the voice of a nationwide rebellion against their authority, and realize that the threat can’t be neutralized until he is silenced. The end game is to crush what they see as a peasant’s revolt. Mueller’s function is to provide a legal pretext for removing the President from office. The role of the media is to misrepresent everything he does in order to trick independent voters into giving the Democrats a majority in the House. This will prevent Trump from continuing to act on his 2016 mandate.

The Democrats will impeach the President if they gain a majority in the House, regardless of their chances of securing a conviction in the Senate. Impeachment will effectively shut down his Presidency either way. Fighting it would involve so much White House time that virtually nothing else would get done. And this is an important Democratic goal. Moreover, if Senate Republicans are as weak-kneed as they were in 1974, a conviction may not be necessary to get Trump out of the White House. If the Democrat-controlled House had impeached President Nixon in August of 1974, the Democrat-dominated Senate would not have been able to convict him without six Republican votes.

Twenty months earlier, Nixon had won a second term in a landslide victory against Democrat George McGovern, garnering 49 of 50 states, and 502 of 538 Electoral College votes. By June of 1974, having been relentlessly hounded by the media and the Democrats over the Watergate scandal, less than 50 percent of the public thought he should leave office. Nonetheless, the Democrats held a large majority in the House and were determined to impeach him. The Republicans controlled 40 Senate seats, meaning they could endure six defections and still avoid conviction. But Richard Nixon, like Trump, was never part of the club. The GOP caved:

Republicans in the Senate had nominated an elder statesman to deliver to Nixon the news that he could no longer avoid impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate. Senator Barry Goldwater… along with House Republican Leader John Jacob Rhodes and Senate Republican Leader Hugh Scott, entered the Oval Office around 5 p.m. The Arizona senator sat directly in front of Nixon’s desk, the others to the side. Goldwater told Nixon he had perhaps 16 to 18 Senate supporters left — too few to avoid ouster.

If the voters are crazy enough to give the Democrats a majority in the House, they will (for the third time) begin drawing up articles of impeachment. The most recent impeachment bill, introduced at the end of last year and voted on in January, received only 66 Democratic votes. Because it’s an election year and impeachment is not popular among the voters who are likely to show up in November, the rest of the Democrats stayed well away from the C-Span cameras. Those poltroons will quickly come out of the closet on November 7th if the midterms produce a Democratic majority in the House. As Roger Kimball points out in that other Spectator across the pond:

It is a foregone conclusion, at any rate, that should the Democrats take the House by more than a narrow margin, Donald Trump will be impeached. He would not, I am convinced, be convicted by the Senate, but the impeachment itself would be messy.

Kimball’s assumption that Senate Republicans will be stronger than they were in 1974 is open to question. The Ancien Régime includes a lot of Republicans, and more than one has speculated about impeaching him: South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham has said that firing Mueller would be an impeachable offense. (Arizona’s Jeff Flake, who is retiring, said the same thing.) There are a lot of GOP Senators who disapprove of Trump, including Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Maine’s Susan Collins, Utah’s Mike Lee, Alaska’s Dan Sullivan, Nevada’s Dean Heller, et al. Can these people, and other less vocal Republicans, be counted on to hold the line for Trump? One doubts it.

All of which brings us back to the point of the collusion between Mueller, the Media, and the Democrats. They are out to get Trump only because they want to crush the populist revolt and restore the Ancien Régime. They have no respect for democracy and even less for the voters. They want to disenfranchise 63 million “deplorable” Trump supporters and go back to business as usual — fundamentally transforming the U.S. into a Venezuela. There’s only one way to stop these creeps from impeaching the President and ruining the country. Every Trump voter who came out in 2016 must go to the polls on November 6 and drown the Democrats in a red wave.