I want you to understand something:

Twitter didn't just nuke @realdonaldtrump today

They nuked the top 35% of his most influential users/followers/thought-leaders.

Why did they take the dramatic and unprecedented step of doing this so suddenly, to perfectly rule-abiding users?

Much like the Gulf War, Trump's presidency never happened. Yes, there were soldiers in Kuwait, and there was a man named Donald Trump in the white house, but there was never a war, and there was never a presidency.

Trumpism was a bubble, and on Wednesday, it popped. In 2016, it felt like the beginning of a new American nationalism. Without Trump, that "movement" dies. Will those embers merely fade, or can the fire be rekindled?

If you want to transform the world, or your country, you cannot fuel your movement on discontent, nor on reasonableness. No, transformation can only be built on a foundation of extravagant hope

Gold toilets aside, Trump never had extravagance, in fact he had no content at all. He was the first fully post-modern president; what he did was so filtered through media that there's no effective difference between what happened and what the media says happened

We projected our dreams onto Donald Trump. A successful mass movement requires belief in an infallible leader or an irresistible doctrine. There is no mass movement without a little delusion (we call it a little delusion) "Reasonable" people can't effect big change

THREAD. I am failing to see any better path for Trump apart from resignation. (Yes, I know you will say, "He'll never do that" but also did you ever think three days ago that he'd be impeached twice?) Here's me as HIS (competent) lawyer:

2. You will be impeached. Your goal now is to avoid criminal liability, and, if possible, jail time. If you resign now, you avoid several unpleasant possibilities. For one, you make the potential for an invocation of the 25th amendment, on the basis that you are CRAZY, moot

3. If you resign, and Mike Pence becomes President, he will likely give you a limited, but nevertheless broad, pardon. If he emulates Ford's pardon for Nixon, you will be pardoned for (at the very least) obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation

4. He MAY be able to give you a pardon for crimes committed BEFORE you took office, such as your campaign finance violation, or whatever sketchy financial crimes you committed, but that is touch and go. There is *some* ambiguity over whether such a "blanket" pardon is valid BUT

5. You could also mitigate this by being frank with him and allowing him to be as specific as possible on your prior criminal liability in the pardoning language (like financial crimes re taxes, etc.). He is, however, unlikely to pardon you for inciting insurrection BECAUSE...

Trump has left the White House.

God what a lovely sentence to type. I might do it again.

Trump has left the White House.

Lovely. I didn't know fingers on keys could feel that good.

Is there a more beautiful sentence? I suspect not.

The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.

And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.

It's our moral duty not to.

Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.

Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.

We've seen our nation's face.

And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.

They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.

Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.

We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.

They don't care about truth, and never did.

We should care about truth, and speak it plain.

This is us.

We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.

Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.