Trump may just get run out of town.

[Hortensis]

72. An Atlantic article's title is "The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple"

The best way to grasp the magnitude of what we’re seeing is to look for precedents abroad.

What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milošević, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali.

(Sharp) wanted to understand the weaknesses of authoritarian regimes—and how nonviolent movements could exploit them. Sharp distilled what he learned into a 93-page handbook, From Dictatorship to Democracy, a how-to guide for toppling autocracy.

Sharp’s foundational insight is embedded in an aphorism: “Obedience is at the heart of political power.” (Me: And haven't we seen that in the Republican Party, their U.S. senators abandoning all duty to subservience.) A dictator doesn’t maintain power on his own; he relies on individuals and institutions to carry out his orders. A successful democratic revolution prods these enablers to stop obeying. It makes them ashamed of their complicity and fearful of the social and economic costs of continued collaboration.

Sharp posited that revolutionaries should focus first on the regime’s softest underbelly: the media, the business elites, and the police. The allegiance of individuals in the outer circle of power is thin and rooted in fear. By standing strong in the face of armed suppression, protesters can supply examples of courage that inspire functionaries to stop carrying out orders, or as Sharp put it, to “withhold cooperation.” Each instance of resistance provides the model for further resistance. As the isolation of the dictators grows—as the inner circles of power join the outer circle in withholding cooperation—the regime crumbles.

The author believes this is what we're witnessing, comparing events that toppled Ukraine's Yanukovoch and others. Trump's main platform Twitter labeling Trump's tweets as misleading was a key event, then hiding posts that threatened violence, which was followed by a "wide swath of" S&P 500 companies withdrawing support.

A cycle of noncooperation was set in motion. Local governments were the next layer of the elite to buck Trump’s commands. After the president insisted that governors “dominate” the streets on his behalf, they roundly refused to escalate their response. ... As each group of elites refused Trump, it became harder for the next to comply in good conscience. In Sharp’s taxonomy, the autocrat’s grasp on power depends entirely on the allegiance of the armed forces. When the armed forces withhold cooperation, the dictator is finished. Of course, the U.S. is far more democratic than the regimes Sharp studied and doesn’t fit his taxonomy neatly. But on Wednesday, the president’s very own secretary of defense explicitly rejected Trump’s threat to deploy active-duty military officers to American streets. ... Jim Mattis’s excoriation of his old boss prodded Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to echo his condemnation of the president. ...

We'll see. The Republican senators are a critical part of this regime's inner defenses. They're currently threatened with losing everything. Or are they? Title of another of this author's articles is Putin Is Well on His Way to Stealing the Next Election -- RIP democracy.