The American people can escape from their Trumpian nightmare in one of three ways.

There’s the Nixonian method, in which the president simply resigns, worn down by the fight, apprehensive of the proceedings that he sees mounting around him, scared. Could that be the exit taken by the 45th president of the United States? Does he have, like his distant predecessor, a strong enough predisposition to melancholy? Can one picture the incumbent child president, compulsive and narcissist, surrendering without a fight the larger-than-life toy that is the top job in the most powerful country on the planet? I doubt it.

Second, there is Article 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, which spells out the process by which the vice president and cabinet can act to replace a president who has died or is prevented by reasons of health from governing. Such had been the case, four years before, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And the amendment was invoked again, unsuccessfully, when Ronald Reagan began to show the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease. But the current situation does not resemble those cases. Trump may be unstable, unfit to govern, mad, as his detractors claim—but is he any more so now than he was when the American people elected him? Probably not.

There remains the remedy of impeachment, which is being discussed more and more openly, these days, in Washington, accompanied (in a sign of the times) by a book, The Case for Impeachment, by Allan Jay Lichtman (Lichtman, a political historian, is famous for having devised a model that enabled him to accurately predict the election of every American president from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump).

As everyone knows, impeachment is a procedure for removal from office of a president, vice president, or other top executive official (or judge) suspected of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” in the phrase of Article 2 of the Constitution.

And it is a complex process that unfolds in two phases: first, deliberation by the House of Representatives, which, by a simple majority, decides whether the charges are serious enough to be tried; second, a full-fledged trial before the Senate, which must reach a two-thirds majority to convict the impeached official and trigger immediate removal from office.

Considering that, there are at least three reasons to doubt that such an impeachment will rid the world of Trump.

First, there is the balance of power in the Senate. At least 19 Republican senators would have to join the Democrats to convict an impeached Trump. At the moment, at most 5 can be counted on to do so.

Second, the only two presidential precedents (Andrew Johnson,impeached in 1868 for abuse of power, and Bill Clinton, impeached in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice) are hardly encouraging, since both ended in acquittal by the Senate.

And finally there is the reluctance of Democratic Party bosses to see ultraconservative Vice President Mike Pence assume the place vacated by a fallen Trump. Wouldn’t he enjoy the same state of grace enjoyed by recent past vice presidents who have stepped into the Oval Office under exceptional circumstances (Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy; Gerald Ford after Nixon) ? And what if he remained in office, not only for the remainder of Trump’s term, but for two four-year terms of his own?

All this is logical enough.

Except that times have changed since Johnson, Ford, and even Clinton.

In post-modern democracies there is one and only one boss: public opinion; and opinion operates according to its own logic.

How long will the public tolerate the almost-daily doses of new evidence of conflicts of interest, starting with the sales to China, at the height of the presidential campaign, of the Trump brand for use on spas, luxury hotels, and real estate projects?

What about the financial ties with Russia? And the shady maneuvers of Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort? What about
the leverage of the several oligarchs who, in 2004, with Trump mired in one of his bankruptcies, stepped in for the American banks that had blacklisted him and recapitalized his companies, advanced him the cash he needed to stay in business, and bought, sight unseen and at premium prices, the penthouses of various Trump Towers? Won’t all these eventually take their toll?

And, finally, what is one to make of the gross obstruction of justice represented by the firing of FBI director James Comey, whose main offense seems to have been refusing to exclude the president from his investigation into the Kremlin’s criminal involvement in the 2016 campaign?

Item: A petition drive to impeach Trump, organized by Massachusetts lawyer John Bonifaz, has gathered more than a million signatures.

Item: Polls indicate that a majority of the electorate would favor Trump’s removal if it were proved that he colluded with Putin to sway the campaign.

Item: Growing numbers of voters are now saying as much to their representatives, who, sooner or later, will have to start listening if they want to avoid putting their own reelection in peril.

For Trump, the real danger will come from the crowd that he riled and cajoled during the campaign and that is beginning to turn on him.

Trump has the face of that crowd, which, as amply demonstrated from Plato to Tocqueville, becomes harder to evade the more you make it master.

The worst case is never an inevitability. May the mob of the populist tide become once again the great American people, a people of citizens. When that happens, Donald Trump will be history.