The Only Goal is Removal

But the way there requires a multitiude

The president must be removed from power.

Even if we needed just one, the legal, moral, and political justifications for removal are already in the double-digits: the unconstitutional abductions and disappearances; the impoundment of congressionally appropriate funds; the millions condemned to die from aid cuts; the intentional sabotage of the global economic system; the sanctioning of vast ecological and environmental destruction; the undermining of the US electoral system; the blatant corruption and use of government for financial gain; the likelihood of accountability for crimes against humanity dissipating after another election; and so on. All of this, of course, on top of the coup that should have barred him from office in the first place.

We can also have significant confidence that the 2026 and 2028 elections will not be sufficient failsafes: that with Trump in power we may not have reliable and secure midterm elections; that, like in 2018, a post-midterms Trump will be even more erratic and reckless; that three years from now, we cannot guarantee a free presidential election; that by the beginning of any new presidency, our institutions and public might be so damaged that we soon have a return to another demagogue.

While the path to removal will be uncertain until it’s achieved – an unknown combination of complimentary strategies that respond to opportunities and threats from the regime – there’s no doubt that the first step is making removal our goal.

On paper, this may sound obvious, unobjectionable, even syllogistic. But in practice, the question of a broad, popular organizing goal has largely bedeviled our movements since Trump’s first election (and plenty more before that). Organizations that serve particular constituencies naturally focus on specific policies of concern to their constituents; political movements with different views of power engage protest, organizing, and elections in different ways. There is also a serious but misguided clique in the Democratic party infrastructure that sees the midterm elections as the only solution and sees the impeachment process as a political loser. Coalescing around a goal is traditionally an idea that sounds nice in theory and, to anyone with real world experience, a labyrinth of spikes in practice.

And yet, we are in the unfortunate combination of crises that both facilitates and demands such cohesion. Removal offers the best chance for that cohesion, as an outcome that would both materially benefit the vast majority of people – from Medicaid recipients to investment bankers, urban college students to rural retirees – while allowing for vast ideological, political, thematic, narrative, and strategic diversity. When I say “removal” I am referring to just that: the departure of the president from power, without dictating the means that brings on that departure. In contrast to the first term’s efforts at impeachment, this goal is not about building towards a legislative process – on that, without conviction, is itself insufficient. But it is about building towards a popular consensus that could enable the success of those legislative processes when they become viable, or enable other other non-legislative means of removal.

The current options for removing the president from power look something like this:

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the president is immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his executive role, a criminal conviction is not a viable pathway. While a military coup or foreign intervention might hypothetically be possible, neither are likely or desirable. What remains are legislative removal (specifically: impeachment followed by conviction) or a popular uprising (specifically: I’ll speak to the nonviolent kind) that forces the president to step down from office.

Pursuing removal as an end – rather than, say, “impeachment” – means we don’t have to choose: the methods for building popular organization and opposition to the regime, when done correctly, would be the same for both mechanisms. In this paradigm, we aren’t thinking about legislative removal as simply needing 218 votes in the House – we’re thinking about needing to achieve the public constituency that embodies a far more dominant majority, both in and outside of legislative politics. The following diagram suggests how sectors across American society could fill their role in the effort towards removal:

In this model, actions by a wide range of entities all contribute towards increasing the popular belief that the president needs to be removed. That common sense – across voters, opinion leaders, institutions, and funders – produces momentum towards both electoral and non-electoral objectives. Rather than considering the legislative process an independent arena, centering removal both produces direct campaign energy towards pro-removal candidates and, additionally, contributes to broader social and political shifts that produce indirect effects on sitting legislators. Continued practice of noncompliance and polarization against the regime – particularly as repression increases – can produce an escalation of tactics that both leads to higher commitment (and further escalation) and make a legislative solution seem like a favorable option compared to mass unrest and disruption. Which exact tactics and combination of strategies and leaders will be the most fruitful is unknowable from this vantage point – but the greater participation across sectors and greater commitment to a united goal will enable strategic flexibility and adaptation along the way.

Our era of polarization will make this seem daunting, but it doesn’t make it any less necessary. Nor should recent American history dissuade us. Past failures to remove a tyrant has never been a reason to stop attempting to remove a tyrant. Moreover, Trump’s past impeachment was not built on popular outrage over material damage to people’s wellbeing. This time is far different. And this time, as at all times, an idea doesn’t get more popular by not talking about it. We are far from the power required to achieve removal. But the only way forward is to start building it.