The coup against President Trump has been developing for months and can be seen on the nightly news. Yet few talk about what it really means for the country and what can be done to avert this fate. Fortunately, we have the bulwark of the Constitution and protracted process inherent in the rule of law. But the urgency and clarity of mind to prevail and prevent the ouster of the President can certainly be heightened by grasping the goals and temperament of the power brokers who seek his destruction and the subsequent reordering of the country.

Suffice it to say that removal of Trump without sufficient cause would likely have dramatic and lasting repercussions. At a minimum, the power brokers involved in a successful coup would feel entitled to a big role in reordering the nation. At the other end of the spectrum, a more dramatic maximum type response could come in the form of a civil uprising of armed constituencies that voted for Trump, who might well feel there is no other recourse from the fundamental betrayal of the ballot box and disenfranchisement by their government.

Among the power brokers, first there are the globalists and open borders advocates that understandably fear President Trump, who is serious about the integrity of U.S. borders, limitations on immigration, the strengthening of national sovereignty. This is a disparate group that includes the sanctuary city movement operating in most major cities nationwide; George Soros and his Open Society Institute and his Soros Foundation network of more than two dozen organizations that include MoveOn.org and Democracy Alliance; radical nativist and Latin American immigration activist groups like La Raza; and establishment corporate business executives such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his open borders organization FWD.us, Disney CEO Bob Iger, who, in late 2014 fired and replaced 250 American IT engineers with lower-paid IT workers from India, and many other corporate executives, like Iger, who are affiliated with the immigration-expansionist group, Partnership for a New American Economy.  

The second group of power brokers in the coup attempt are those in the political establishment -- liberal politicians, bureaucrats, and deep state operatives in Washington, as well as media professionals who carry the former’s water and promote their views. Because these are the people who are in essence “the swamp in Washington," they are directly threatened by Donald Trump. People in this second group are largely corrupted by power, access to power and status in the nation’s capital, and they don’t want any disruption of the privileges that the Washington swamp bestows. These are the people in the forefront cheering on the fishing expedition of Robert Mueller and his stable of more than a dozen heavyweight Washington insider lawyers in their open-ended investigation and the unspoken but implied mandate to impale Donald Trump and set the stage for his impeachment.

The third group of power brokers are the myriad radical neo-Marxist special interest groups, driven by separate causes such as the environment, climate change, race and gender, anti-imperialism, anti-militarism, human rights and refugee resettlement. These groups tend to attract a lot of youthful idealists -- the foot soldiers whom Lenin referred to as “useful idiots” who are absolutely essential in revolutionary mass movements, and who will quickly and easily mobilize through social media to specific demonstration sites -- ready-made for TV media coverage. Most of the people in this third group are intolerant of diverse opinion and have no use for the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, which is to say they want to see America collapse or be “fundamentally transformed” -- a phrase from Obama’s lexicon. 

Returning to the opening inquiry about steps to stop this silent coup, Article II of the United States Constitution states in Section 4 that "The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors." Now with Mueller’s impaneling of a grand jury drawing from a pool of citizens in Washington, D.C. -- a city that voted 91% for Hillary Clinton -- it may not matter that there is no evidence of treason or bribery when vagaries of high crimes and misdemeanors can be successfully alleged.

Until there are arrests and successful prosecutions of criminal misconduct of high-level officials from the former administration and other political moles remaining in the national security bureaucracies, there will continue to be leaks from Trump-haters in the deep state who continue to have access to the most confidential matters. Just before Trump left D.C. for summer break in early August, his private telephone conversation, conducted shortly after inauguration, with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, was leaked. The transcript of the call was published on the front page of the Washington Post -- portraying Trump as unreasonable and being at variance with campaign promises on the subject of the border wall.  

Think about it. The media have been in a frenzy to report, re-report and over-report any appearance of impropriety by Trump, or members of his campaign and family --  especially alleged instances of collusion with the Russians to help Trump’s bid to defeat Clinton -- even as they brazenly collude with people in the deep state engaging in criminal activity to bring down the President of the United States.

Surely the moment the Sessions Justice Department moves on former government officials and deep state operatives, the media will go crazy. The recent proclamation of Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, that “Every American should be concerned about the Trump administration’s threat to step up its efforts against whistleblowers and journalists [is] a crackdown on the free press and on democracy,” says it all and will be repeated in the media echo chamber ad nauseam.

Two-hundred-plus years ago, John Adams was reflecting on history in his correspondence with John Taylor -- more than a decade after serving as the second President of the United States -- and said, “Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.”

What is President Trump to do? Ignore the media, take Adams’s observation seriously, but also take heart in the fact that the U.S. democracy is a constitutional republic ruled by laws not a democracy ruled by the often irrational passions of people. In addition, unlike the secular progressive forces arrayed against him, President Trump is surrounded and protected by prayers from citizens across the land.

Trump’s pledge in his oath of office to protect the Constitution against enemies “both foreign and domestic” and his acceptance speech delivered at the July 2016 Republican Convention both contain key priorities for this time -- that if not acted on expeditiously and resolutely -- may bring a premature end to his Presidency with calamitous consequences. At that convention, then candidate Trump reminded the nation that, “When the Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, and deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, then lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence, I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country.”

Mr. President, the success of the priorities you articulated and for which the people voted, will likely go down if you go down. Better get the criminals in the swamp before they get you, toppling you like the statues recently pulled down in a convulsion by fanatics seeking to rewrite and erase American history -- coming now as a prescient warning about how dangerously close we may be to the end of the American Republic.

Scott Powell is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org