Impeachment will backfire because the D.C. Leviathan still does not understand why Donald Trump was elected. After all this time, the Democrats, the NeverTrump Rump, and permanent bureaucratic power-grabbers still believe that the 2016 election was about a cult of personality. To them, President Trump is a mere carnival barker, some unholy mixture of P.T. Barnum, Franz Mesmer, and Huey Long. They have therefore spent the last three years trying to convince his supporters that he is a pretender, a Republican interloper, an emperor with no clothes. They have been convinced that if they can only expose Mr. Trump as a fake billionaire, an apostate of conservatism, or an un-American foreign agent, then his voters will pack up, retreat from his rallies, and demand his removal from office. Instead, his appeal has become more robust, and once lukewarm support has turned hot.

What the bow tie–wearing myopics of the swamp can't or refuse to see is that President Trump's support comes, at its source, from growing animal spirits in America convinced that the federal government is a major problem. The country elected Mr. Trump, in part, because he promised to be a giant club willing to bash the D.C. hull repeatedly until it sinks into the Potomac River basin. You can't fight a war if you don't even understand the positions of the players or the stakes involved, and the D.C. denizens prove every day that they have no idea what's going on in the minds of those living between the coasts.

We have watched the federal government grow and transform into something we hate and fear. There were no constitutional conventions or amendments for these changes; rather, the federal courts took it upon themselves to reinterpret the Constitution with the silent consent of Congress and successive presidents until they had effectively co-opted power originally guaranteed to the individual states or the American people themselves. Giant administrative agencies now tower over our lives, even if they reside in D.C. They conjure power for themselves out of thin air, but their application of power is very real. They choose whom to tax, what land to seize, whose gods must be respected, and whose faith must be destroyed. Administrative agencies force American citizens to bend to the wills of faceless swamp things, and nobody in D.C. sees this as the direct assault on Madisonian republicanism that it is. Vesting all the awesome powers of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches in the unmitigated wisdom of twenty-seven-year-old cubicle kings is tyranny, and that is what we have.

Lies have always accompanied the struggle for human power, but the federal government today trades in the currency of deceit with such gusto that it should offend any free people. It is hysterically ironic to hear Deep State acolytes attempt to separate President Trump from his voters by accusing him of being untruthful. We've watched President Obama sabotage the peaceful transition of power, John Brennan and James Comey conspire with the FISA Court to frame President Trump as a Russian spy, news personalities routinely spread the lie that President Trump is racist, and Democratic moles and fake whistleblowers falsely accuse President Trump of crimes actually committed by President Obama and Vice President Biden. Hearsay and innuendo against President Trump are the only news of the day. For those living between the coasts, the federal government and the legacy media vomit forth such unrelenting and inscrutably mad deceptions upon the American people that any exaggeration from the president seems nostalgically folksy in a Huck Finn type of way by comparison. And like Finn, if the president occasionally fibs, at least we know he is a hero with a good heart who works on our behalf. The D.C. coup-plotters and power-grabbers, in contrast, sacrificed their souls long ago in service to the cretinous golem into which they've breathed life.

It has troubled us deeply that the Left has succeeded in capturing almost all of the permanent bureaucratic government in D.C. What many of us did not know, however, was how successful they had been in capturing the Republican leadership as well. All this time, the very intellectual and political leaders who have cautioned restraint, urged our moral compromise, and forced us to accept that some legislative goals are simply beyond our reach had more in common with the champagne socialists of the D.C. circuit than with the voters in the middle of the country who provide for their comfortable lifestyles. After all, once we handed the Republican Party control of the House, Senate, and presidency, they made sure to thank us by saving Planned Parenthood and Obamacare and giving credibility to the Russian collusion con. Many of us had a great epiphany: what if most of these conservative and Republican leaders had abandoned us long ago and merely served to keep us docile until the Marxist-socialist conquest was complete?

No, there will be no going back to former pundits and party leaders who dishonored us with lies while working alongside the very people and institutions we have spent a lifetime opposing. Like the Leviathan they revere, their mettle is based on adornment and fluffy stuff. They are playthings of the Left, obsequious creatures beholden to their paymasters and status friends, men and women with no honor, no moral codes, no great understanding of what it means to be free. They take and give oaths to themselves, and we shall forever see them as political whores.

So when President Trump's enemies seek to manipulate us into acquiescing and consenting to his removal from office, their strategy is all backwards. The Left long ago learned to use our virtue against us by appealing to our moral leanings and our sense of shame. They cry out at us: "Look at this man. He betrays all of the customs and traditions of the American government. He lies to us and threatens us and dares to question the absolute truth of the press. He is uncouth and ill mannered and actively seeks to find our pressure points and pour salt in our wounds. He is no true Republican. He is no true conservative. He countermands everything we've stood for, everything we've worked for, everything we've promised to the rest of the world. He finds nothing sacred in what we do." Nothing could make us happier. The more they protest and accuse him of terrible things, the more we see him as a great and dangerous club with which to pound the Deep State and post-constitutional order into the ground.

They would have been better off actively courting him, conquering him, and converting him, as the federal Borg has so successfully done in the past. If the State Department, Congress, and the spongy Republicans were all singing his praises right now, then we would have known that our 2016 bet had failed and seen the wisdom in looking for leadership elsewhere. As it stands now, there is no greater honor than being despised by the very collection of people who have so richly earned our derision. These impeachment proceedings should be considered nothing less than public meetings of the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.