In early 2021, I remember asking people why it was necessary to impeach President Trump a second time. He was already out of office and impeachment is the tool in our Constitution to remove an elected or appointed federal employee from their position. It was a pointless action, unless I was missing the point.

The call was singular and solid, and here was the point, or so I was lectured at the time.

Trump needed to be impeached so he could never run for president again.

Setting aside that isn’t how impeachment works or what impeachment does, I couldn’t get over the insane childishness of using our Constitution to settle a playground fistfight. Nancy Pelosi had always been that bitter, rejected kid picked last for dodgeball who grew up to be the bitter, vengeful Speaker of the House, and this was – in retrospect – the earliest roots of undisguised, unapologetic Trump Derangement Syndrome on an organized national scale. It was equal shares pathetic and terrifying.

That so many Americans gleefully and fanatically accepted this justification for impeachment as logical and righteous was beyond terrifying. The distress was deeper. It felt like how I felt when Mr. Rogers died, but only as if he died by ritual Aztec blood sacrifice on live TV. And that’s exactly what it was, a coming death of constitutional rule of law, the deliberate deconstruction of our Constitution replaced by woke mob rule at the behest of a skeletal Speaker wielding a bloodied obsidian blade.

Moreover, there was a bizarrely naive hubris attached to the idea of using impeachment to bar Trump from ever running for president again. Who was Speaker Pelosi to make this decision? Who were these wayward Americans to unilaterally choose who could and couldn’t be president, on behalf of all Americans?

That’s what an election decides. Our Constitution is very clear on this. It’s the will of the American people if Trump were to run again and be elected. Pelosi and her TDS minions were by design and purpose disenfranchising American voters. Narcissistic nihilism, or just plain, unethical arrogance, it disgusted me to the very core of my American patriotism. Gross.

Abusing our Constitution so flagrantly is the epitome of un-American. It’s literally what is meant by an existential threat to our republic.

We’d spend the next four years watching our republic be threatened over and over with more gusto, sadism, and success everytime.

Fast forward to now, the first week of November 2024. President Elect Donald Trump is the greatest political comeback story of the last century. Through two impeachments, countless lawfare indictments, punitive financial civil litigation trying to take Trump Tower from him, attempts by two states to unconstitutionally keep him off the 2024 ballot, and not one but two assassination attempts, President Trump took every attack in stride and the American people who cherish our Constitution and our country selected him a second time to captain our battered ship.

Without saying, that illogical second impeachment strategy didn’t keep President Trump from ever running for president again. Massive fail. And above the rewarding warmth I feel from well-deserved schadenfreude, I feel more warmly the realization the last four years of our nation wandering the immoral, unconstitutional wastelands are now tangibly and certainly behind us.

Words like “vindication” and “exoneration” are central to the election triumph discussion, but for me it’s more that unfamiliar sensation of arriving at a destination I thought didn’t exist any longer that’s resonating. The will of the American people. The constitutional rule of law. And securing both the electoral and popular victories. I’ve got this notion 73 million other American voters are experiencing a resonating arrival all their own right now. And most probably the rewarding warmth of well-deserved schadenfreude to boot.