A schoolyard bully who steals your lunch money and claims it was always his, is wrong. Not just morally but factually. The lunch money was never his.

Same token — a person who cheats on their bar exam or pilot’s license isn’t actually a lawyer or a pilot. They never actually qualified for it and therefore never really had rights or privileges that were given them UNDER FALSE PRETENSE. Get that last part — the FALSE PRETENSE part? Stick a pin in it. We’re coming back.

The guy cutting you open may call himself a doctor — and the scalpel in his hand is horrifyingly real — but he is not, in fact, by our mutual agreement (because we have created standards for our mutual benefit and safety) that thing he’s calling himself — be it doctor, lawyer, pilot — or POTUS.

Now, I’m simply going by the Rule Of Law here — and, as always on this blog, I assume we’ll find a way back to a world where the Rule Of Law “is” again because the overwhelming majority of us prefer it that way. Maybe that’s why I remain hopeful (if uneasily so) — though Americans should have taken to the streets en masse many insults to human decency ago, there will be a point where even the most apolitical American gets up on his hind legs and says “STOP!”

The majority of Americans do not like being told what to do by “outsiders”. They love their creature comforts — a lot. They want simple lives, yes, but simple lives of comfort. Trump’s impact on this country is only just playing out in full-assed Technicolor. It’s been building to this from the day Russia stole the 2016 election for Trump.

We’re not talking about the Trumpanistas. They’re “never-wozzers” where Democracy is concerned. They’re a more malignant version of the 29% of Americans who still approved of Nixon on the day he resigned because of Watergate — the last Republican power grab that we managed to stop just in time. We’re talking about the 40% or so of Americans who never or rarely engage with politics.

These are the cynical ones — never instilled with civic pride because we just don’t teach it. Civic pride doesn’t instill itself, ya know. To a degree, their cynicism is understandable. Money has always had a louder voice and bigger vote. They got that. But, that was the whole point of “giving money the vote” — to further empower the money and further disempower the actual voter.

2018 began something — a very real awakening. The surge of women into politics will continue unabated because women finally cannot tolerate living in a male-dominated world. That won’t merely effect the sex of the people doing the legislating, it will effect how those people legislate. They’ll do it like women. They’ll do it more multi-laterally than unilaterally. In fact, it’ll be the rare decision that ever gets made unilaterally at all. Because women’s bodies are designed to bear children, they know in their atoms — no one can have or raise a child by themselves. They can try — and they might not die. But they absolutely will not thrive.

Women know a lot about legitimacy. I don’t mean as it pertains to kids with married parents, I mean how it pertains to who deserves what and who doesn’t. Women have had to fight damned hard to get a fraction of what men get in the marketplace — not because their ideas are worth less or their skills less — but because they’re women. Glass ceilings are completely illegitimate. They’re not a legitimate thing. They don’t represent a legitimate reason to exclude women and their talents from the game.

Legitimacy matters.

I believe women will refuse to accept Trumpism going forwards because they will have rejected it in their guts from the get-go. Trumpism is built on a gross, male lie — “I alone can fix it”. If I want to stick my dick somewhere, I’m sticking it there.

That’s not legitimate — except as a rape threat.

We must see EVERYTHING now in its totality. We cannot see all these isolated bits and pieces of the mosaic — Mitch McConnell denying Barack Obama all those lifetime federal judges especially the SCOTUS seat — Mitch McConnell refusing to let Obama tell us that Russia was all in to make Trump POTUS — Every Trumpian lie about Russia — Trump Tower Moscow — Every Republican lie about Russia including the fact that they’ve always known about (starting with “I think Putin Pays Rohrbacher & Trump”) — every time Trump has attached himself to Putin’s anus like a limpet to a shark — every sledgehammer blow to our system of government — we have to see every single corrupt shard as part of a gigantic corrupt whole: Treason.

People who commit TREASON to become President of The United States? They can’t BE President. They’ve already broken the main rule. Remember False Pretense? You cannot “win” the presidency of this country under it.

It’s a contradiction of terms therefore to say you’re president when, in fact, you are not.

Donald Trump did not clear the most basic hurdle of becoming LEGITIMATE POTUS. He did not win the presidency legitimately.

Once we make that the foundation — our starting point for all facts going forward — then first fact we have to acknowledge is Donald Trump is not now — nor has he ever been — the legitimate president. Not being the legitimate POTUS, he never had ANY of the rights, privileges or the authority to do what legitimate POTUSes do — create legislation, represent our country abroad, nominate judges.

I’m not authorized to make air traffic decisions. I might show up and claim I have the authority and even bring along powerful friends who agree with me — that I do. But I don’t — and clearly I’m not making air traffic decisions because I care about safety in the skies. I’m not sure why I’d lie about being an air traffic control person but I know exactly why I’d lie about cheating to become POTUS.

How can the victims of a crime — that’s what We The People are in this instance — be forced to endure a lifetime of the criminal getting away with it? Who says that has to happen — when we can prove how utterly criminal the criminal here is? An election result was stolen from us. That’s not an abstraction.

We The People voted for open-minded, progressive-leaning judges — that’s who the people WE THE MAJORITY voted for. We got fascists instead. That’s not our democracy working, that’s our democracy being hijacked.

We do NOT have to listen to hijackers. We do not have to do what they say or let them win. We can turn — right now — and look these criminals right in the face. They won’t meet our eyes — of course they can’t. They’re guilty little boys who’ve been caught out again. And this time we caught them doing something diabolically bad.

That’s why they’re fighting so hard to kill our democracy dead. If the Rule Of Law is still a thing? Every last Republican (okay — save, MAYBE a few) is going to prison for the rest of their lives. Traitors deserve nothing less.

What can we do to stop Trump & the Republican Party? Let’s start by calling them what they are — TRAITORS. Let’s also make it clear that we view 2016 as not an election but a crime scene. The election result needs to be inspected in far greater detail. We The People want the facts — as best we can reconstruct them.

We want to know what REALLY happened in 2016. If Trump — or ANY Republican — worked with Russia IN ANY WAY to facilitate Trump’s “win”, we cannot say that election was free or fair. Considering what we KNOW Russia was up to — and why?

Tossing the results of election 2016 is a big ask. But how else can we possibly proceed from a starting point of “DONALD TRUMP WAS NEVER LEGITIMATELY PRESIDENT”?

Why on earth would we insist on legitimizing what we know was treasonous? Who the hell could that possibly serve?

Oh, wait — I think I know…