Maybe I was right after all.

Like most people, I never thought that a habitual and well-known con-man and crook, an admitted and unrepentant serial sexual harasser, an erratic conspiracy theorist with no filters apt to say or do almost anything, a habitual and quite accomplished liar, a man whose narcissism was so obvious that even William F. Buckley openly used that word in describing him, an inarticulate blowhard whose public statements were often incomprehensible and nearly always so fraught with clear and obvious misstatements of fact that it was difficult to take anything he said seriously, a man with the emotional maturity of an eighth-grader whose ignorance of economics, international politics, history, and the Constitution were not only obvious but so profound as to be more apt to inspire laughter than thought among any marginally informed citizen, a businessman so inept that investing his inheritance in the stock market would have made him far wealthier today than has his career as an unethical real-estate investor and consistently unsuccessful founder and CEO of other business ventures, a man with over three hundred instances of being caught breaking various legal and ethical business recreation in his career, and an open bully with a record of using his deep pockets and notariety to take advantage of and abuse those less powerful than himself could ever be considered by a major party as a potential president, much less be elected to that office.

But Donald Trump is not simply a con-man. It's his single talent- and he's very, very good at it. He likes to call himself "a very stable genius." He's far from being stable, and even farther from being a genius- except at self-promotion. He managed to establish a wholly undeserved reputation as a shrewd businessman and parlayed his very eccentricity into a familiar, if vaguely comical, public personna. His habit of spouting bizarre and implausible conspiracy theories and ill-informed, half-baked positions on public issues put him in a position to become a spokesman for the nation's tinfoil hat brigade and the more ill-informed but vaguely angry among us had no trouble in seeing a champion in him. A series of flukes- an abnormally large number of unusually well-qualified but relatively obscure Republican presidential candidates who split the votes of reasonable and sensible Republicans among them; the polarization which led many to so despise Hillary Clinton as to see almost literally anyone as a better alternative president than she; the growing and increasingly obnoxious influence of the extreme and socially disruptive left on not only the media and the culture but most clearly in the Democratic party; the fact that so much of his following consisted of alienated, politically marginal types, not in the habit of voting and thus not included in the polls; and the random combination of states in which his odd, extreme, and information-poor army of followers managed to give him a November majority despite his very sensible rejection by the majority of Americans managed somehow to but him in the White House and make him the single most dominating political figure not only in the nation but in the Western world despite never, since the day he announced his candidacy, having managed by a consensus of the polls to have commanded the support of more Americans than opposed and disapproved of him.

He and his supporters seemed somehow to have missed that point, and nurtured a strong, though completely delusional, image of him as leading some sort of revolution in public opinion and the direction of national policy. And to be sure, parallel figures in the other nations of the world- Putin, Le Pen, Johnson, and others- have assisted the series of accidents and coincidences that put a man wholly unfit for the office intellectually, temperamentally, and morally into the Oval Office in creating the illusion among those who want badly enough to believe it that they were witnessing something profound and history-changing rather than the accidental and very temporary emergence of a man whose role in history would inevitably be as nothing more than a curiosity.

Or if it was more, as something darker: a man whose bombastic and ill-informed opinions could potentially, if transformed into policy, lead a nation and a world emerged in the not very distant past from the second greatest economic crisis in their history into something both chaotic and very ugly. This would be the man whose every word not only the stock market but the nations of the world would hang upon simply because of the enormous power that was his. This was the man whose hand would not only be on the levers of political and economic policy but whose fingers would be on the nuclear button.

That his term in office would be a disaster seemed to me to be inevitable. His historical ignorance and naivete concerning protectionism and trade wars alone seemed likely to wreak economic havoc. His neo-isolationism- however popular among some elements on the increasingly extreme American right- would let the forces of evil and oppression run wild in ways so antithetical to American interests that even his extreme and ill-informed partisans couldn't help but see the problem. I believed that for a variety of reasons 2016 would, like 1976, feature a "poison pill" election in which whoever won- whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump- be doomed to serve a single term. And given Mr. Trump's radical personal unfitness for the office and ill-informed, ill-considered opinions on so many things to which he would likely cling with characteristic stubbornness, I saw it extremely unlikely that he would even finish his term.

Perhaps, given his instability, he would be removed by the Cabinet under the 25th Amendment. Perhaps he would be impeached and- since he lacked Richard Nixon's political instincts- convicted and removed from office by the Senate. But most likely, I thought, a man with his thin skin would resign in a show of childish petulance when the pressure became too great. Perhaps he'd even become bored with having the world as his plaything.

I didn't reckon with the willingness of the overwhelming majority of Republicans and conservatives to support him despite his contempt for the Constitution and due process, his stubborn ignorance, his making America the laughingstock of the world on a virtually daily basis, and his general ineptitude. I thought better of men and women I'd always considered to be people of honor and sense than to think that they could willfully ignore so many things they knew just as well as I did because they were so bound and determined, by hook or by crook, to defeat the left.

Yes, I knew about the Supreme Court. It was my one reservation about opposing Mr. Trump. But the course of history is hard to predict. I was by no means certain that Donald Trump would have the opportunity to change the direction fo the Court, and despite the continued attempts of the left to smear Brett Kavanaugh I have to concede that in that respect, at least, America is better off for his election.

But in no other. Our current prosperity is despite the policies of Donald Trump, not because of them; it's a continuation of trends which began under his predecessor, against whom I voted twice but whom I must admit will go down in history as the president who brought us out of the Great Recession and into the period of economic renewal for which his successor wants to take credit despite the tale clearly told by a mere glance at the dates on the graphs tracing our arrival at our present situation.

Our system has turned out to be far more resilient than I had thought. To be sure, "grown-ups" like Generals McMaster and Mattis and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson managed to restrain Mr. Trump through the early period of his administration, and the testimony of administration officials obtained by Special Prosecutor Mueller's paints a graphic picture of an administration whose members simply ignore or disobey the president's decisions and orders simply in order to prevent him from destroying himself, and potentially the country.

Despite his openly siding with our nation's enemies in the matter of the Russian interference in the 2016 election, and despite the manifest evidence resulting in the indictment of a large percentage of his campaign staff for illegal contact with the Russian government, and even despite the evidence of attempts by Mr. Trump to obstruct the Mueller investigation, no "smoking gun" connected him to the Russian contacts, or implicated his campaign directly in the hacking of the DNC's computers. And his skill at self-promotion, together with their own blind partisanship, has resulted in the president's supporters to this day generally his inaccurate claim that the Mueller report exonerated him despite direct assertions to the contrary by both the Mueller report and subsequently by Robert Mueller himself. Somehow, Mueller's acceptance of a widely-held theory that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted has been manipulated into the vindication of that president because it did not recommend that he be prosecuted!

I was beginning to think that I might have been wrong. I was beginning to think that Mr. Trump was going to survive his term after all and that it might be the American electorate which would assert the opinion it has held all along, amplified by the changed opinions of a large number of people who voted for him in 2016 but have realized their mistake, and remove him from office in November of 2020. But maybe not.

It seems that a whistleblower in the Trump administration- a patriot who, to Mr. Trump's way of thinking, is a traitor for putting America ahead of Donald Trump- insists that in a conversation with the president of the Ukraine Mr. Trump- who openly admits that he sees nothing wrong in accepting political "dirt" on his opponents from foreign governments, even if obtained by espionage against the United States- offered financial aid to his country in exchange for information incriminating the son of is likely 2020 opponent, former Vice-President Joe Biden.

Moreover, typically, the White House refuses to release a report on the incident to Congress. It's odd that so few Americans consider Mr. Trump's refusal to release his income tax returns to the public on the ground that he's under audit to be suspicious, despite the fact that the IRS says that there's no reason for him not to and that other presidents under audit, notably Richard Nixon, didn't hesitate to release them, to be suspicious. Oddly, more aren't concerned by the repeated attempts of Mr. Trump and his administration to withhold information from and obstruct the Mueller investigation are more than suspicious, but problematic. Why would an innocent president with nothing to lose politically be so secretive?

Oddly, more Americans aren't bothered by how hotels and other businesses owned by the president have profited by their apparently preferential use both by our government and others anxious to curry favor with him.

But now, an accusation has been made that the President of the United States has offered foreign aid to the government of another country in exchange for "dirt" on the son of a political opponent. This is not a complicated matter requiring the appointment of a special prosecutor. This is a simple and direct issue of clear concern. There can be no doubt that, if the president did what the "whistleblower" claims, it is an impeachable offense. And the question has to be asked: why is the White House refusing the request by Congress for the report? What doe it show?

What does the president fear? What does he have to hide?

This is no matter of criminal prosecution. A very strong case can be made that such a clear and easily-understood attempt by the White House to obstruct this investigation would in itself be an impeachable offense.

Like many opponents of the president (Nancy Pelosi comes to mind), I have opposed his impeachment on the simple ground that, first, there is no possibility that so insanely partisan a Republican Senate would convict him no matter what the evidence, and that, secondly, a failed attempt to remove him would add credence to Mr. Trump's oft-repeated belief that he is being picked on and that people are "out to get him" and thus enable him to weaponize his inevitable acquittal. But if indeed, there is convincing evidence that Mr. Trump personally offered a foreign government American aid in exchange for information which he personally could use against a domestic political opponent, that would be a game-changer.

Doubtless, many Trump partisans would claim to be unable to see the problem. But most of the Republican members of the Senate couldn't be so disingenuous. That would be an act of corruption so blatant that no reasonable person could credibly deny that it constituted just the kind of "high crime and misdemeanor" the Constitution means when it talks about grounds for impeachment.

This would be Watergate redux. This would be corruption so outrageous, so easy to understand, and so plainly disqualifying from any office of trust and responsibility under the United States that only the densest or most pathologically stubborn partisan could fail to see that it would demand Mr. Trump's removal from office. If such a thing were proven, it would be impossible for even a Republican Senate in this hyperpartisan time not to convict him.

Ironically, it could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the Republican party, the conservative movement- and, given the radicalism of a contemporary Democratic party which otherwise would be without a credible opposition party for the foreseeable future, for the nation.  It would become possible for a chastened Republican party and a chastened conservative movement to redeem itself. It would not simply make a break with Trump and Trumpism possible. It would make it obligatory.

Especially given President Pence's Pentecostal piety and the fierceness of the culture war, his fight for election in his own right would be even more uphill than was President Ford's. But at the very least it would open up an opportunity for a Republican party blinded by partisanship to find itself again.

I said when he was elected that Mr. Trump, a man who throughout his career has made a practice of cutting ethical and legal corners, would be unable to resist doing so as president and that I saw that as likely to be his undoing.  Especially combined with his personal unfitness, I thought, there was no way that he would remain in office long enough to be defeated for re-election.

I had just about reached the conclusion that the loyalty of his "babysitters" and the partisan mania of the moment would prove me wrong. But the Ukraine incident suggests otherwise. If the whistleblower's accusation is proven true, America's political world will be turned upside down even more dramatically than it was when Richard Nixon resigned- and, as unlikely as it has seemed since Election Night 2016, it seems possible that the Republican party and the conservative movement, at least long-term, might yet be saved.