Should Donald Trump win the presidency, a prospect that looks almost impossible at the moment I am writing this, he certainly wouldn’t be the first misogynists and philanderer to occupy the White House, but he would be the first populist demagogue since Andrew Jackson who had broken through to that office, and everything he says leads me to believe he would, whether out of ignorance or the desire for the efficiency and the rush of power,  either disregard or even begin to dismantle our now over two century old constitutional order.

Thankfully, and barring some catastrophe, or some scandal regarding Hillary Clinton so troubling it erases her current advantage (a prospect that given the Clinton’s history is uncomfortably possible), Trump will in all likelihood lose. The immediate task will then be to shore up the legitimacy of the system with his followers who will likely doubt the results.

My prayer is that none of the disappointed whom Trump has whipped into a frenzy over a “rigged” election turn his dark and violent words into actual bloodshed. Indeed, Trump may be on the verge of tying together a host of disturbing, contemporary trends to create something genuinely new- a political movement as pure spectacle whose goal isn’t so much power as to nurture the desire for revolution only to feed off of the very individuals it cast as heroes crushed by a sinister and cruel order.

That’s the real danger: that we’re only at the beginning, rather than near the end, of this already exhausting drama. Conservative commentator, and, from the beginning outspoken opponent of Trump George Will thinks that Trump might be like chemotherapy for the GOP, his historic loss ultimately purging it of those who either never held the core principles of America’s libertarian brand of conservatism, or were more than willing to surrender them when it became politically expedient. Yet it is just as likely that Trump will end up being the midwife of a politico-media entity that would be like cancer itself eating away at the legitimacy of the the body-politic in which it lives.

Even discounting the potential for violence that would come from such a permanent movement of this sort, that’s a pretty dark vision, so let me close my eyes and imagine a much brighter scenario. That Trump on losing the election does what every other political figure, regardless of how nasty, has done since the birth of the Republic- that he graciously admits his legitimate defeat. To make my day dream even brighter, after his loss, Trump slithers away from the political world and back under his glittering rock of beauty pageants and Trump Success eau de toilette spray from which he came never to be heard from again.

Now to wake up- even if Trump and his Trumpians disappear from the political scene, it is still the case there will remain a hell of a lot of work to do, which we should have known had we ever watched The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (though I was always a Letterman man myself.) On The Tonight Show Leno used to do a skit where he’d walk the streets of New York. He would stop people and ask questions every American should know about the country’s history and politics such as “What do we celebrate on the 4th of July?” Or “Who is the vice president?”. The gag was just how horribly wrong people answered these questions. It was a funny segment, but also kind of, well… sad.

What we’ve seen in this election is how such ignorance can be turned into a weapon. And I don’t mean ignorance as in stupidly, as in Trump and his supporters are somehow stupid. Trump is anything but stupid, and if the people who follow him whom I personally know are a representative sample, neither are his followers. Rather it’s that that both Trump and his loyalists seem to be either ignorant or uncommitted to the very principles that hold our quite fragile polity together in the first place.

The proof I have of this assertion is not only statements that Trump himself has made, but that he has apparently never lost core on account of them. Instead, what seems to be sinking his campaign is the same sort of sexual character accusations we’ve be accustomed to for quite some time, and which almost destroyed the presidency of the spouse of his rival.

Democrats have aggressively, and sometimes shamefully, tried to personalize Trump’s political attacks, a tactic that’s probably effective, but which muddies the principle- we give rights to people despite the fact that we dislike them. In fact, it’s the people we dislike the most who are in greatest need of rights. Trump, and that means the perhaps forty percent of Americans who think he’s a fit candidate for office, have shown disregard or ignorance of rights guaranteed by the constitution in at least the following ways:

• He has challenged the fundamental legitimacy of the people to elect a president of their choosing
• He has assaulted the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment
• He has proposed the use of police tactics deemed in violation of constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizures under the Fourth Amendment as determined by a court of law
• He has proposed rejecting the First Amendment’s protection of religious minorities
• He has threatened the abrogation of international treaties, including limits on the power of the US government to kill innocent civilians
• He has publicly urged the intelligence services of a hostile foreign power to interfere with our elections
• He has proposed the abrogation of the Fourteenth Amendment
• He has challenged the right to counsel as enumerated in the Sixth Amendment

In other words, in modern times we’ve never seen a political figure show such ignorance of, or disregard for, the very principles which hold our country together. More importantly we’ve never seen what is actually an anti-constitutional movement become the animating force behind a major political party. And while some might think this signals that the so-called “American Creed” has had its day, we might also conclude that this election has taught us the importance of not only the constitution itself- in providing protections against want to be tyrants- but the necessity of remembering, or even merely learning- and teaching our children- what its principles and protections actually are.

Painting: “A Christian Dirce”, by Henryk Siemiradzki.