What Trump represents, and why impeachment is not the answer

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to op-ed essays, "Trump and the politics of Arf": 

In part just because so much of the significance of Trump's presidency is in his personal style, which treats statements about any part of the world as mere commands, and uses personal attacks in lieu of arguments, it would be a sign of the failure of the left and liberal opposition if he is taken down personally by impeachment for misconduct.  

In America, power is often psychological. Our popular culture is soaked with notions of the therapeutic.  

Ronald Reagan consecrated this idea in his famous 1984 presidential debate with Walter Mondale when he said, "There you go again." Now an avuncular psychological gaze could browbeat political and intellectual adversaries by replacing argument with diagnosis.  

Left-liberals did not see this. The hippies became the New Age, a rainbow coalition of therapeutic elixirs for middle class whites. Feminists declared that the personal is political. The reverse is what happened.

Consider the case of President Nixon. In fact, both break-ins (the Democratic Party, and the war' whistleblower's (Ellsberg) shrink, were about the war.  

But the impeachment effort meant that Nixon was only a man who lied and cheated. The left loses when political differences are called moral failure. A revolution is not a courtroom trial. 

Trump is the name of a quasi-fascism, not its cause. It will survive him. So other methods must be used to oppose it. Crime is not a category of political judgment; only the right wants that.