Now I understand very well all the reasons that in the event of a Trump impeachment over Stormy Daniels or anything else, most evangelicals will probably rally to him instead of gently elbowing Pence in to take his place. We do not have a parliamentary system where party leaders fight internal battles and get replaced by their internal rivals on the regular; instead, we elect a quasi-monarch, whose removal seems as traumatic as a regicide. And thus party loyalists tend to identify with their leaders the way royalists identify with their kings, and regard the prospect of impeachment not as an opportunity for a change of leadership but a revolutionary threat.

What this means for the Trump coalition is that lots of Republicans who once resisted the Trumpian takeover have now accepted the various narratives that cast him as an indispensable man — because he’s the only Republican who knows how to fight, because his removal would be a victory for the hated establishment and the even more hated media and the many-tentacled Deep State, because whatever else happens you can’t let the liberals win. And evangelicals have their particular version of these Trump-the-indispensable conceits, from the analogies to King David (who slept around a lot, too, didn’t he?) to the widespread belief that Trump’s repeated against-the-odds victories mean that Providence somehow chose him for this role — and whom God has elevated, let no man impeach.

But for all their inevitable appeal, these are bad reasons to pre-emptively reject impeachment, in the Daniels case or any other that Mueller might reveal. And I don’t just mean they’re bad reasons because they’re too partisan and tribal; I mean that the evidence from the last case like this, the Clinton impeachment in all its splendor, is that the partisan and tribal response does not necessarily serve your party or tribe that well.

There is no way of knowing exactly what would have happened, of course, had Clinton been pushed out by Senate Democrats and Al Gore installed in his place. But there are good reasons to suspect that as an incumbent steward of late-1990s prosperity untainted by his steadfast support for a lying boss, Gore would have had an easier time dispatching George W. Bush in 2000, and the entire trajectory of the early 2000s would have been more favorable to Democrats. And there are also good reasons to think that professional feminists, who contorted themselves absurdly in defense of Clinton’s predatory conduct, would have been better off accelerating their reckoning with the pigs of liberalism rather than waiting for the age of Trump and the old age of Harvey Weinstein.

These lessons could apply to a Trump impeachment as much as to the Lewinsky affair. A Republican Party that ran in 2020 with a boring Midwestern guy (albeit, yes, one sure to be trailed by protesters in Handmaid outfits) as the steward of prosperity would not necessarily be worse off than a party lashed to its current leader; if Gerald Ford could almost win in Nixon’s shadow, why not Pence in Trump’s? And a religious conservatism that sacrificed a lot of cultural credibility in defending Trump might regain a little by abandoning him, vindicating itself against what seem now like reasonable charges of “character for thee but not for me” hypocrisy.

Plus, there’s the providential aspect. Sure, making use of Donald Trump to keep Hillary Clinton from being president is a fascinating flourish by history’s Author, but the idea that the Almighty might use a porn star to make Mike Pence president represents, if anything, an even more amazing miracle. So anyone interested in looking for the hand of God in history should probably welcome that miracle’s arrival, rather than resisting in the name of MAGA.

Am I jesting? Only to a point. That God has a sense of dramatic irony and narrative surprise seems like one of the most obvious lessons to be drawn from the Trump era. That God is using Trump not as an agent of his good work but as a kind of ongoing test of everyone else’s moral character seems like a not-unreasonable inference to draw. That God would offer religious conservatives in danger of selling their souls a chance not just to step back from the brink but to literally replace Donald Trump with a fellow religious conservative — well, that seems like just the kind of opportunity that a beneficent deity would grant to erring members of his flock.

And for those same religious conservatives to pass up the chance, preferring a scorched-earth battle in defense of priapism, would be a sad confirmation of the point that a beloved Christian author made many years ago: The doors of hell are locked on the inside.