It’s gut-check time. With each guilty plea, each indictment, each tweet, it becomes evident that Donald Trump is not the legitimate president of the United States. He was hoisted into the White House by at least one foreign power to whom he and his regime are now beholden. Trump’s domestic and international policies, such as an ill-conceived tariff war with China, unplanned troop withdrawals from Syria, and US abdication from key international treaties, reflect a White House that has been captured and is implementing the chaos policies that Vladimir Putin wanted.

The big question for 2019, however, is “What are Americans going to do about it?”

Impeachment will not be sufficient. Nor will a deal where Trump simply resigns and hands over the reins to Vice-President Mike Pence, who was handpicked by now-convicted felon Paul Manafort (guilty of conspiracy against the United States), and, who, as head of the transition team, overlooked the numerous warnings about Michael Flynn as a national security risk.

The problem, frankly, isn’t simply Donald Trump. He has been aided by a coterie of enablers, who have exploited the fissures, flaws, norms and loopholes in American democracy that allowed the unscrupulous to prosper at the expense of the people and the nation itself.

Removing Trump, while essential, will not fully address the work that needs to be done. Instead, it is going to take an effort akin to Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables to repair, rebuild and strengthen America.

And the first step is to understand what went wrong.

It is going to take a Herculean effort to repair, rebuild and strengthen America

Dark money and white supremacy fueled the disintegration of the Republican party. Without any viable core ideology to act as a lodestar, especially one that would resonate with the majority of Americans, the Republicans’ only raison d’etre now was power. Unable to win elections outright as they had in the past, the Republican party resorted, instead, to voter suppression, election fraud, cancelling elections and lame-duck electoral nihilism. In doing so, the Republicans not only deliberately undercut democracy but showed their utter contempt for it.

Unfortunately, that disdain could not be isolated or quarantined. Instead, it metastasized and wreaked havoc on the constitutional necessity of checks and balances, including the crucial role of the Senate to “advise and consent”. Far too many nominees for the federal bench and US supreme court as well as cabinet officials either lacked the minimum qualifications for the position or had an abundance of ethical issues that bordered on the criminal. Yet, with no rubric other than power, the Republican-dominated Senate confirmed most of them by subverting the process and ignoring evidence of incompetence or wrongdoing.

This was, of course, most striking in the supreme court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. Although 93% of his papers were still unavailable to the Senate judiciary committee, the Republicans, led by Senator Chuck Grassley, crafted an unreasonably accelerated confirmation timeline. The Republican senators glossed over questions about judicial temperament and partisanship, alcohol abuse, sexual violence and how hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt accrued and disappeared within a year. During what was essentially his job interview, Brett Kavanaugh also probably committed perjury, then taunted, disrespected, raged against and accused some US senators of being conspirators out to destroy him – and, despite all of that, he still got the job.

Even worse, although chief justice John Roberts tasked the 10th circuit with reviewing the numerous charges of misconduct against Kavanaugh, the judges concluded that while the allegations were “serious”, they didn’t have the authority to go further because Kavanaugh was now a supreme court justice. In other words, lying to Congress en route to the supreme court means that the only consequence for that perjury is a lifetime appointment to a prestigious position.

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Clearly, then, the debasement of the rule of law is not far behind. Alan Dershowitz, for example, explained that “lying to the FBI is not a crime”. It is. Similarly, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, said that paying hush money to former sexual partners “was not a crime” although public knowledge of the affairs might have affected the outcome of the election. But it is a crime. Trump claimed that his son’s meeting in June 2016 with Russian nationals to get the dirt on Hillary Clinton was “totally legal”. It isn’t. Pundits on Fox News actually minimized “something nearing treason”, as no more than the equivalent to “pulling off mattress tags, jaywalking, parking tickets”.

There is not even a basic, foundational agreement that something is fundamentally wrong, illegal even, with meeting the ambassador from Russia to undercut the foreign policy of the United States and then lying about it to the FBI. Nor does there seem to be any understanding that negotiating a real estate deal that requires Vladimir Putin’s approval and offering the dictator a $50m penthouse to sweeten the pot, was problematic. Or recognition that doing so, while securing the Republican nomination for president and lying repeatedly about any connections to Russia, quickly moved beyond bribery to compromising US national security because it put Trump in the Kremlin’s extortionist crosshairs. Yet, despite the gravity of the offense, Fox News host and Trump confidant Sean Hannity claimed, “No crime was committed … Even if it had happened, there’s no crime here. None whatsoever.”

The absolute numbing of legal and ethical senses is a direct threat to the viability of the United States. In fact, 71% of Republicans, despite the numerous guilty pleas, indictments and evidence of conspiracy and corruption, have become so anesthetized that they consider Robert Mueller’s investigation a “witch-hunt”.

Meanwhile, the horrific policies that have continued to stagnate the industrial and agricultural heartland, treat non-white immigrants like Hitlerian Untermenschen, militarize the police in African American communities, flatline wages while corporate profits soar, ignore the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, regard women as no more than a uterus, and abandon millions of Americans to bankruptcy or worse if a major illness or accident happens, portends disaster. As does the anti-environmental, head-in-the-sand climate change positions that have overdosed on fossil fuels and ignored the necessity of solar and wind energy.

The coming year will be pivotal. Proposals are out there to take these systemic problems head-on. Of course, Trump has to go

This year will, therefore, be pivotal. Proposals are out there to tackle these systemic problems head-on. Of course, Trump has to go. And Lawrence Tribe has done a brilliant job of detailing the legal authority to indict a sitting president. In addition, Trump’s appointees, because they are clearly fruit of the poisonous tree, must also step down. If they want those positions, they need to undergo a real vetting process – not the sham that the Republican leadership implemented that allowed a slew of federal judges who couldn’t even get certified as “qualified” by the American Bar Association on to the bench and ushered in a virtual deluge of grifters, tramps and thieves (with all due apologies to Cher!) in the cabinet.

Also, the regime’s cruel policies must also be jettisoned and replaced by those that embed dignity, the rule of law, and democracy into the operating code of the United States. There are proposals for immigration reform, a Green New Deal, restoring the Voting Rights Act, non-partisan redistricting commissions, nationwide automatic voter registration, increasing the minimum wage, eliminating dark money from campaigns, protecting the special counsel’s investigation, electoral college reform, and restoring ethics as foundational for public service.

This, of course, looks like a herculean task. But it’s gut-check time. Whether the nation decides in 2019 that this work is too hard and simply accepts the fate of stagnating in years of political and economic filth or whether it embraces the challenge and takes the mighty rivers of democracy and justice to clean out the stables will ultimately determine the future of the United States.