From the 2016 election campaign right through the current travesty of impeachment, the Democrat Party and its march-in-lockstep media allies have made it clear that their hatred of Donald Trump — which necessitates his removal by any means necessary — transcends any resulting damage they have done to the nation. Damage that may be irreparable.

Let’s begin with a reality check. The current impeachment effort is only the latest vehicle being used to remove Trump from office. Previous vehicles included the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, and the Russia investigation. Prior to his inauguration, the media campaigned for Democrats to reach a deal with Republicans and persuade Electoral College electors to defect, and The Washington Post reported efforts to impeach Trump had begun 17 minutes after he was sworn into office. Far more important, before Trump’s election, the Obama administration initiated its scandalous Crossfire Hurricane project to investigate Russian collusion with members of Trump’s campaign staff and the president himself.

Reality check number two: Any and all collusion that ostensibly occurred did so while the Obama administration was in charge. Moreover, rather than warn fellow Americans from the opposition party that the Russians might be seeking to influence the 2016 election, Barack Obama’s administration instead chose to assume those opposition party members were committing treason, thereby justifying all methods, even felonious ones, used to stop them.

On to double standards. The same Democrat/Media Complex that assured Americans for three years Trump’s collusion with Russia was incontrovertible were completely sanguine regarding Obama’s open-mic assurance to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that he’d “have more flexibility” regarding his relationship with Vladimir Putin. And they remained sanguine two years later, when Putin seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.

That same year, then-Vice President Joe Biden openly bragged about getting Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating corruption at Burisma, an energy company paying Biden’s son, Hunter, $83,000 per month by threatening to withhold a billion dollars in foreign aid. By contrast, Trump allegedly threatened (belied by a transcript of the conversation in question) to withhold funds that weren’t ultimately withheld in return for an investigation that was never undertaken.

But Trump is the one guilty of a “quid pro quo,” and any investigation into the corrupt machinations of Biden and his son can precipitate impeachment proceedings?

Robert Mueller’s investigation was tasked with finding Russian collusion. Yet it somehow managed to avoid determining how the thoroughly discredited Steele dossier — bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC — gained credibility among the highest echelons of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.

The bigger picture? Does anyone seriously think President Trump could, among many things, gotten away with having members of his executive branch file warrants with the FISA Court under false pretenses; spying on members of Congress and the press; running weapons to Mexican cartel members; taking out an American citizen with a drone strike; selectively targeting conservative groups using the IRS; communicating with his secretary of state on an unsecured server; and sending pallets of cash to a nation sponsoring worldwide terror — without the deafening clamor for impeachment Barack Obama miraculously avoided?

Eight years of the Obama administration clearly demonstrated that the media are willfully blind — and justice is anything but. Yet the weaponization of impeachment has moved this nation into uncharted territory. Americans now live in a nation where private presidential phone calls with foreign counterparts “will be leaked and printed in the major media,” and impeachment will be a “casual affair” to be undertaken routinely, whenever the opposition party has a House majority, even if it is solely used for political gain, Victor Davis Hanson explains.

Moreover, as Nancy Pelosi amply demonstrated, timeliness is now irrelevant. “Once a president is impeached,” Hanson adds, “the writ may simply sit until the House majority feels that the climate or polls are ripe to refer the articles to the Senate for trial, whether in days, weeks, months, or years.”

Equally irrelevant is the “term high crimes and misdemeanors.” Nothing illuminates that better than charging Trump with obstruction of Congress, a nonsensical assertion borne out of the need for Democrats to keep impeachment front and center, rather than wait for the Supreme Court to ultimately decide what obligations co-equal legislative and executive branches of government have to each other.

“Whistleblower” is now a meaningless term. Going forward, anyone with second- or third-hand information, working in coordination with the opposition party, will be deemed acceptable and credible, even as their identity can remain secret indefinitely.

Investigations? Testimony can be taken in secret and selectively leaked to the media for partisan advantage, while witnesses can be prevented from answering questions posed by the opposing party. Law enforcement and intel agencies can hire foreign nationals, use operatives to co-opt the media, employ multiple “confidential informants” (read: spies) to glean information about members of the opposing party’s campaign, and unmask private citizens involved with those campaigns, all under the auspices of protecting national security.

To advance those investigations, any surveillance requiring a warrant can be rubber-stamped by FISA Court jurists, whose knowledge of being lied to will not precipitate legal consequences, but simply demands for “reform” — from the liars themselves.

Remarkably, Democrats and their contemptible allies have done it all while ignoring one of the oldest adages known to man: what goes around comes around. They have not only set the stage for the permanent paralyzation of government, they are well on their way toward making elections utterly irrelevant.

In fact, their point man in this charade, documented liar Adam Schiff, has made that abundantly clear. “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box,” he insisted. “For we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”

In other words, American voters are too stupid to be trusted, and unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats running the administrative state must prevail. Thus, an acquittal of Trump by the Senate will be deemed a “miscarriage of justice.” In turn, that miscarriage of justice will make the 2020 election “illegitimate,” unless a Democrat prevails.

If Trump wins? Additional impeachment proceedings. If a Democrat becomes president? The only flaw in Hanson’s argument is the traditional cowardice amply demonstrated by a GOP that would likely allow a Democrat Party to continue running roughshod over the Constitution, undoubtedly promoted under the absurd auspices of “saving the republic.”

By then, there will be no republic to save. “We are now on new anti-constitutional grounds, and the United States will probably never return to the constitutional customs and traditions of its first 233 years,” Hanson predicts.

Thus, Americans are finally discovering what fundamental transformation is really all about. A constitutionally contemptuous Democrat Party, suffused with a lust for uncontested power and thoroughly convinced of its moral superiority, has precipitated the ultimate irony:

Democrats had to destroy the nation in order to “save” it.