There were a lot of people who were Reaganauts going in, as there are always people who are conservatives going in. But they don't act like conservat… - John Bolton

Impeachment, of course, is, for the most part, only a theoretical guardrail constitutionally. The real guardrail is elections, which Trump faces in November 2020. Should he win, the Twenty-Second Amendment precludes (and should continue to preclude) any further electoral constraint on Trump. While liberals and Democrats focus on impeachment, conservatives and Republicans should worry about the removal of the political guardrail of Trump having to face reelection. As this memoir demonstrates, many of Trump's national security decisions hinged more on political than on philosophy, strategy or foreign policy and defense rationales. More widely, faced with the coronavirus crisis, Trump said, "When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that's the way it's got to be." He threatened to adjourn Congress, wrongly citing a constitutional provision that has never been used. No conservative who has read the Constitution could be anything but astonished at these assertions.

After I left the White House, when Trump abandoned the Kurds in Syria, there was speculation about who he might abandon next. Taiwan was right near the top of the list, and would probably stay there as long as Trump remained President, not a happy prospect.

Of course, politics is ever present in government, but a second-term Trump will be far less constrained by politics than he was in his first term. The irony could well be that Democrats will find themselves more pleased substantively with a "legacy"-seeking Trump in his second term than conservatives and Republicans. Something to think about.