Sometimes I think I’m the sole journalist who was paying attention during the rise of Donald Trump.

The Donald would send out a tweet and tens of thousands of his supporters would line the streets. When Trump would mention Hillary Clinton, the crowd would erupt into a chant of “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

After his win, Trump could have followed through on that request from the faithful. Instead he was magnanimous toward his rival.

"I don't want to hurt the Clintons, I really don't," Trump said in an interview televised two weeks after his victory. "She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways."

Trump soon announced his pick for Attorney General. It was U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, a hapless hayseed from Alabama. Sessions promptly recused himself from any investigation into Clinton’s actions regarding that infamous email server.

I suspect things might have worked out differently if Trump had chosen as his AG an experienced and aggressive prosecutor like Rudy Giuliani or our own Chris Christie.

At the Republican convention that year, Christie had elicited chants of “Lock her up!” from the crowd.

Here’s what Christie had to say in his recent book “Let Me Finish” about Sessions’ decision to recuse himself in the Clinton case as well as in the Russia controversy:

“If Jeff Sessions felt such a burning need to recuse himself because he had somehow been compromised by his role in the campaign, he certainly had an obligation to tell the president-elect before being nominated as attorney general.”

He did indeed. At that point Trump could have replaced him with an attorney general who had the common sense to go after the president’s enemies, not his friends. There never would have been a Mueller Report.

There was, however, and it gave the Democrats two years of fun before America learned there was no “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

Still, many Democrats are insisting that their majority in the House should go ahead and impeach Trump anyway.

They never take my advice but I’ll give it anyway: Quit while you’re ahead – or behind.

Many Democrats want to impeach Trump on the grounds that in that Russia inquiry the president put his thumb on the scales of justice.

But that’s exactly what he did when he publicly announced his Justice Department would not be going after Hillary Clinton.

Some Trump supporters complained about that. But I didn’t hear any Democrats do so.

It was a case of the shoe being on the other foot, which is a theme of the book “The Case Against Impeaching Trump” by Alan Dershowitz.

In the book, the Harvard law professor, who is generally sympathetic to liberal causes and is a zealous defender of civil liberties, cautions his fellow Democrats not to get carried away with their attacks on Trump.

Dershowitz argues that there’s nothing illegal or impeachable about a president giving orders to his appointees in the Justice Department.

He writes “under our constitutional structure the president may direct the attorney general and the head of the FBI as to who and what to investigate and/or charge with crimes as well as who not to investigate and charge with crimes.”

What the Democrats are calling “obstruction of justice” is simply the exercise of constitutionally permitted presidential powers, Dershowitz argues.

That hasn’t stopped people who should know better from baying for impeachment.

Dershowitz noted that among them was his fellow Harvard Law School professor, Laurence Tribe.

Normally a calm and collected commentator, Tribe got hot under the collar when the subject was Trump.

A month after the 2016 election, Tribe tweeted that impeachment

proceedings should begin “on Inauguration Day.”

A week after the inauguration, Tribe tweeted that “Trump must be impeached for abusing his power and shredding the Constitution more monstrously than any other president in modern history.”

Trump gets that sort of emotional reaction from both sides of the spectrum. For every MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter, there’s a committed liberal who believes Trump’s mere existence is an affront to our constitutional system.

That’s certainly their right. But if Hillary had won the presidency, there would have been just as many Trump supporters calling for her impeachment – at a time when both houses were in Republican hands.

This is a precedent that I for one don’t want to see set. Before long our presidential elections would become an endless game of musical chairs - with vice-presidents waiting in the wings for the music to stop.

There’s another means of replacing presidents. A mere 17 months from now, the voters will have that option.

I would urge the Democrats to direct their efforts toward the 2020 election.

But if they want to start an impeachment at this late date, all I can say is good luck.

You’ll need it.

BELOW: THEY DIDN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT THEY WANTED:

Here’s a video I shot at the end of a Trump event. For whatever reason, he always ends with this Rolling Stones song: