There is no reason for them to stop, for a dozen values of them, because it has been working so well for so long, for a dozen values of it. The multiple anti-Trump screwjobs put into place from 2016 until the present were largely effective in limiting the ability of his administration to exercise power or ultimately retain it, and approximately no one who undertook them faced any negative consequences. The institutional structures put into place to constrain Trump have if anything strengthened, to the point where it is now solid law that actually convincing voters to vote against the Democrat party is, in leftist parlance, “super fucking illegal” to the extent it is effective (what if some of the voters are black? That’s a civil right bro), which it isn’t ultimately allowed to be. Petitioning government officials for a redress of grievances? Going on TV to complain? You’d better believe that’s a heckin’ RICO charge.

There is a meme, mostly bought and paid for, that this is all Caesar’s Trump’s fault, the bastard, and if we just stab him to death and go with Ron DeSantis everything will go back to normal. We can keep cycling the consulship through prominent families who are vested in the system for another 500 years.

This is delusional on both the specific and structural levels. The polling does not support DeSantis winning the GOP nomination while Trump is alive and able to be voted for. The polling does not support DeSantis winning the general election having participated, even passively, in killing him. One must construct increasingly bizarre scenarios for this to make any sense, and you can’t plan on Biden getting hit with the heart attack gun at exactly the right moment to result in a 30% turnout Harris – Desantis battle of psychosis versus autism, followed by DeSantis peacefully executing the 1936 level purge necessary to drain the swamp. And if he does not in fact start “slitting throats”, what prevents the exact same tactics from being used against him, or any other candidate who threatens “our democracy”? Trump isn’t even the first instance!

In the general case, you’re probably not voting your way out of this, although a vote might be a necessary precondition for an actual solution. Just like in 44BC, the problem is not actually Trump specifically. Trump is an attempted solution to, or at least a result of, structural problems that have existed for a long time, and weirdly enough the problems are similar to 2000 years ago.

The idea that all the prominent Romans would get together and have a series of quaint ceremonies to select various magistrates who would be around for a year or so is great when you’re operating at city government size – not so much when you’re deploying hundreds of thousands of soldiers and auxilaries a thousand miles from home to steal infinity gold and govern an overseas empire more valuable than Rome itself. Similarly, the idea that you actually let Sean and Pedro vote on the operation of a massive internal and external American empire is increasingly farcical – sorry bro, but the policy has been decided, you don’t get to change it just because you won an election. We have commitments to our NATO partners, and obligations to our underprivileged, that transcend petty notions of “which candidate would you like to have a beer with” and are enforced by a class of people you absolutely don’t get to vote for. This is the “swamp” that Trump purported to be draining, and which is now sucking him down into an abyss. Presidents in such a system are essentially figureheads, unless they develop their own independent base of support.

So what to do?

There is no easy general solution here, but there is something to do about the immediate problem. When Trump (which is to say Trump voters) is excluded from the formal democratic process, as he probably will be, the formal democratic process no longer exists. It’s time to recognize this fact. If Trump is not on the ballot, cancel the election. Heck, even if he is on the ballot, cancel it when his campaign is crippled by pretrial conditions imposed by party hacks in robes, or any of the other indignities he is about to be subjected to in an effort to prevent a real contest. As many GOP states as possible should declare there is no longer a reason to consult the electorate on their choice of candidate when they are not allowed to vote for the guy they plainly want, and all indications seem to be that he will not be allowed to win. No voting then – appoint electors directly via state legislatures.

The goal here is not “acceleration”, it’s a formalization of reality. It turns out that tiny little cabals of bureaucrats you’ve never heard of decide how elections will go down. Fine! Let’s our bureaucrats and your bureaucrats line up. Ideally at least one blue state would take the bait and reciprocate by also appointing electors directly, and a new equilibrium emerges. If California wants to stick to their current practice of mailing a dozen postcards to every residential address so their subjects can dutifully color in the single “hombre naranja es malo” box, then that’s just the localism that makes America great, like not being able to pump your own gas in Jersey. There’s no reason to humor them by pretending they didn’t also select the outcome in advance – especially when local DAs are dropping indictments without even the pretense of a rigged grand jury vote.

Recognizing that power lies in institutions like state legislatures and the people who finance them, rather than some malleable national Voice of the People, is its own reward here, as is delegitimizing voting procedures that have roughly the credibility level of a half-filled Subway Sub Club card. I’m sorry sir, those are no longer valid. The normie has limited attention and must be forced to look at the thing that actually matters – is your local legislator, who only represents maybe 50,000 people, which is to say maybe 10K people with political agency, dutifully following your collective desire to own the libs? Can you, personally, put together a chunk of constituents to bother them about it?

The odds this converges to a new equilibrium of small-R republicanism that stabilizes our situation are slim; there are no silver bullets here. Nevertheless it would be an improvement to focus on things that can be influenced while robbing co-opted institutions of their last shred of legitimacy. Democracy isn’t pretty; make sure the old whore’s syphilis scars are on full display as she gracelessly expires.