It is a strategy that President Donald Trump has deployed throughout his life, as instinctive and natural to him as the act of breathing: Villainize whoever is blocking his way.

Distasteful as Trump’s taunts might be, ridiculing adversaries has been the blunt-force instrument that propelled his political rise, with the president turning people into targets of scorn. As the impeachment fight enters its public phase, though, Trump faces a quandary. His go-to move may be inadequate in this moment for the very same reason the impeachment threat is so grave. There may be too many accusers who believe he shook down Ukraine, too many people who find fault with his behavior for the president to smack with a rhetorical mallet.

Early in President Donald Trump’s term, White House aides worried that he was spending too much time cocooned in the building. So they went to a senior official and pitched an intervention of sorts: Take him to dinner one night at the Peking Gourmet Inn, a Chinese restaurant in the Virginia suburbs where both Bushes dined as president. The aides recognized that Trump was doing himself no favors by marinating in the personal feuds and Twitter spats that make up so much of his daily life, and thought a low-key dinner might be a therapeutic diversion.

“You’ve got to get him out of the White House!” they said to their colleague, a person close to the White House told me. Don’t announce it or make a big deal of it. Just go.

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

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Yesterday, strong winds and rainstorms pushed water levels in Venice, Italy, to the second-highest levels ever recorded. The high-water mark hit 74 inches (187 centimeters), just short of the record set in 1966. This exceptional acqua alta has flooded businesses and historic structures, sank boats, and been blamed for one death so far.

The first day of public hearings into the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump included an explosive revelation. William B. Taylor Jr., the senior American diplomat in Ukraine, tied Trump even more directly than we previously knew to the effort to pressure Ukraine to probe his political opponent.

But as damaging as Taylor’s testimony proved, it was merely another massive boulder in the avalanche of evidence against the president. We are well beyond the point that any disinterested person can deny that the president abused his power and acted in a corrupt manner, in ways the American founders explicitly warned against.

That the president acted the way he did should surprise exactly no one, given his disordered personality and Nietzschean ethic, his pathological lying and brutishness and bullying, and his history of personal and professional depravity. The president is a deeply damaged human being—and therefore a deeply dangerous president.

HONG KONG—For months now, I’ve been told that Hong Kong’s protests would end soon. They’ll end when school starts, I heard during the summer. School did start, but the protests wore on, only now I saw high-school students in crisp school uniforms joining the protesters’ ranks. Next, the mask ban of early October was supposed to slow protesters down, but the very first day after that ban, I watched streams of protesters in masks and helmets make their way to their usual haunts on Hong Kong Island.

The government shut down many of the subway lines that day, a practice that has become a de facto curfew, because Hong Kong’s über-efficient subway system is the way most people get around. No matter; the protesters ended up walking, sometimes a lot, and I walked with them, asking some of the same questions I had asked for months: Do you think you will continue protesting? What would it take for you to stop?

There was a time when the withdrawal of roughly 50 American Special Forces from a couple of outposts in a remote part of Syria wouldn’t have generated a wave of angst across the world about the United States unceremoniously dumping its allies and terminating the international system it has led for more than 70 years.

That time is decidedly not now.

When I recently asked a European official about the fate of the Syrian Kurds, who, after that U.S. retreat in October, came under Turkish assault, the official referenced President Donald Trump’s contention that the fighting had “nothing to do with” the United States. In just over a week, the violence left hundreds of Kurdish fighters and civilians dead; more than 100,000 people displaced; the near defeat of the Islamic State in jeopardy; and Turkey, Russia, and the Iranian-backed Syrian government carving up territory vacated by the Kurds and the Americans.

When Bill Taylor, the United States’ acting ambassador to Ukraine, began his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee yesterday morning, MSNBC did what news networks will often do to educate viewers about the events unfolding on-screen: It offered a graphic providing contextual information. “Top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine since June,” one bullet point noted, explaining Taylor’s most direct relevance to President Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings. “Testified he had ‘clear understanding’ aid tied to probes,” another bullet went, referencing the military support the United States withheld from, and then gave to, Ukraine. “Texted it would be ‘crazy’ to withhold Ukraine military aid,” went another.

Suppose that the biblical story of Creation were true: God created the universe in six days, including all the laws of physics and all the physical constants that apply throughout the universe. Now imagine that one day, in the early 21st century, God became bored and, just for fun, doubled the gravitational constant. What would it be like to live through such a change? We’d all be pulled toward the floor; many buildings would collapse; birds would fall from the sky; the Earth would move closer to the sun, reestablishing orbit in a far hotter zone.

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Let’s rerun this thought experiment in the social and political world, rather than the physical one. The U.S. Constitution was an exercise in intelligent design. The Founding Fathers knew that most previous democracies had been unstable and short-lived. But they were excellent psychologists, and they strove to create institutions and procedures that would work with human nature to resist the forces that had torn apart so many other attempts at self-governance.

The House’s public impeachment hearings will test whether Donald Trump was right when he declared that his political support is so rock-solid that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without consequence—and what it means for a bitterly divided nation if he was.

Even some Republican political professionals privately acknowledge that the coming weeks of testimony, which began with a devastatingly detailed account yesterday from William Taylor, Trump’s own acting ambassador to Ukraine, are likely to present an unflattering picture of the president. They’ll bring to a potentially large television audience the testimony from a sober procession of national-security officials in Trump’s own government, who’ll describe how the administration tried to manipulate Ukraine.