Safeguards only matter when there are people and institutions to enforce them. Remember all those people they fired? All part of the plan.

Actually no, not really. The safeguards were mostly customs, not laws, so they can be safely ignored.

And what few laws there are, like the emoluments clause, seem to be entirely unenforceable because it’s not clear anyone has standing to bring a suit and the president presumably isn’t going to enforce the law on himself.

What we’ve learned in the last twelve years is our democracy was built on the good will of the people we elected, and when we stopped demanding the good will with our votes it was no longer guaranteed.

There were, but it turns out that the moral fortitude required to defend them was just a figment of the national imagination.

The senate?