A quiet coup is taking Trump down.

The departure announced today of Presidential senior strategist, the ultra-nationalist Steve Bannon, former publisher of Breitbart — once Donald Trump’s most ardent advocate and arguably his most intelligent (if misdirected) advisor — signals a sea change in the White House. It’s not unexpected.

It’s been apparent for awhile now that Donald Trump’s freewheeling days as President have been numbered. Even his most sickening sycophants within the Republican party and his administration have been embarrassed to speak about his multiple excesses on many fronts. But in truth, Trump’s already nothing more than a crazy storefront window attraction, a carnival barker, an empty if amply-stuffed suit. As a result of a quiet coup, Trump has been caged. Now what to do with him?

The Orange Man, scourge of The Apprentice, the “Really Fabulous” Mr. Trump has outlived his usefulness to the conservative business interests, corporations and the very wealthy who backed his candidacy. He was their front man, their self-aggrandizing clown, a trained monkey who. last year — armed with ignorance, chutzpah, undue press attention, his own fortune, and little else — vanquished a weak stable of Republican presidential candidates and then humiliated America’s former royal family, the Clintons, with his electoral college-ordained victory over Hillary, the Democrats’ experienced but humorless and mendacious candidate for the Presidency.

Boy-man Trump, the victim of a harsh high-end childhood capped by exile to a military academy, was a magnet for the worst elements among the American people. Trump’s weird relations with women, his disdain for “elites” (though at the same time, celebrating many of them as some of “my best friends”), and his affinity for ultra-conservative and right-wing causes, to which he gives rare attention.

In 2016, Trump began his role as Big Top pitchman. Hyping an otherwise dull primary season, he dominated the Republican presidential candidate “debates” by being the basest of the base. His role as MAGA chief rabble-rouser expanded as the season progressed to the point where, for the Republican Party, it was either accept Trump as the chosen candidate despite his unpredictable, incendiary ways or watch a woman waltz into the White House and the Democrats, even as spineless as they had become, continue programs like Obama’s that the Republican politicians (and more importantly, the wealthy individuals who backed them) found odious despite their thin quality.

Trump with his sexist, racist, and nationalist outrages rallied eternally poor backwoods denizens, expiring empty-plains communities, exhausted workers, and the unemployed sabotaged by dying industries and soulless corporations. He did it so well that he was appointed President by the Electoral College despite losing the majority vote. And there his usefulness to the politically powerful, other than as a signer of desired legislation, came to an abrupt end.

First, there was (and remains) the issue of Trump’s being a minority President, an historical one of a kind, without moral authority to lead. Contrary to FDR’s affection for radio, which required intellect and eloquence to make a point, Trump fell all over himself for Twitter, tweeting in 140-character bleats endless nonsense and absurd claims. As throughout his life, Trump made enemies quickly, friends never.

Then a dossier appeared, with convincing pedigrees, that suggested Trump could be blackmailed by the Russians at will. (Trump’s Putin-love, not reciprocated by the object of Trump’s affection, apparently has more to do with his personal wealth and power than fear of his comrades.) But it was the bogus claims related the inauguration ceremony — inspiring the invention of “alternative facts” by aide Kellyanne Conway and repeated by now-departed White House spokesperson Sean Spicer — that revealed just where this administration was going: into the ether, through denial or obliviousness. It didn’t help that the next day the global Women’s March eclipsed Trump’s momentary glory, inspiring his and his fractional followers to demeaning insults. Then in rapid succession — within months — came Trump’s refusal to make public his tax returns. The Flynn affair. The involvement of unqualified Trump family members in government affairs. The appointment of social outcasts Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, and Sebastian Gorka, an out and out, ridiculously self-important, fascist.

Offences against the commonweal became the modus operandi of the Trump Administration. “Fake News” conferences. Endless, meaningless executive orders. Nominations to the Cabinet of social reprobates who would reliably create Trump’s legendary “Washington swamp” where before there was none (each approved by the craven Republican senators without exception). Then the Islamic-nation travel ban, immediately tossed by the courts. The appointment of reactionary judge Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court. Yet the Administration itself was virtually paralyzed by an absence of appointees to hundreds of vacant department and agency positions.

Trump’s personal calumny increased.

The Russians. Comey. Rosenstein. Mueller. Sessions. Leaving the Paris Accord. Chastising NATO. Unsuccessfully muscling Mexico. Attacks in Yemen. Syria (big booms, no change). Clumsily wooing China. Praising Duterte’s death squads in the Philippines. Isolating ally Qatar. Personally traveling to Europe to praising increasingly authoritarian Poland and outright fascist Hungary. And now, North Korea and again, Iran. Trump’s is a disturbed foreign policy notable for its absence of prudence and in the case of North Korea, its threat of a nuclear conflagration.

Meanwhile at home, Trump racked up no wins. No money for the Wall. No reversal or replacement of Obamacare. No infrastructure program. In fact, as of next Sunday, Trump will not have achieved one serious legislative victory in his entire eight months in office — a sad record among American Presidents.

Most importantly, Trump produced no tax reform to benefit the wealthy, the one reason for which Trump’s most important constituency, individual billionaires and business in general, were glad to see him elected and in his tide, a Republican Congress. But all they got for their support were nationalistic threats about foreign dealings, some dubious regulation-lifting, and an indictable President muttering about pardoning himself for his crimes.

This more than anything has numbered the days before the bloated (and thus vulnerable) hedge fund and stock bubbles will collapse. Unemployment is barely up (a legacy of Obama’s regime), wages are mightily down (as they have been for the last 40 years), and the economy is continuing its miserly growth. the mob is getting restless. Corporate pitchforks and torches have been sighted, reinforced by the post-Charlottesville exodus of CEOs from Trump’s business councils (now disbanded by him as self-protection), sickened by his divisive, pro-violence, pro-Confederacy, pro-Nazi comments.

Trump’s current entanglement with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other right-wing thugs — whom Trump’s vindictive campaign stump emboldened — and his inability to concretely improve the the circumstances of actual working people, especially those underemployed or unemployed is a concrete impediment to his presidency. But in realpolitik terms, it pales before the disappointment of the billionaires, investors, hedge funds, banks, defense contractors, farm lobbies, the religious right, and the NRA, each expecting Trump and Congress to endow them with largesse, unbridled freedom from regulation, and license to dominate American culture and society. It hasn’t happened yet and may never.

Though the cadre of generals detailed to ride herd on Trump — the so-called “adults in the room” — seem incapable of reining him in, and even though the Cabinet is staffed with yes-men lackeys, Congress through inaction has rendered itself impotent. Trump has no friends in government. Only Family Trump and his mock-revolutionary sycophants in the West Wing still coddle the President, who continues to tweet gaseous emanations, increasingly fascistic and fantastic — possibly delusional — about imagined enemies, who have grown to include anyone who has publicly defied or, worse, denied him. His popularity is down to a stubborn one out of three Americans, many grown abused children, who refuse to admit that their Stern Father Trump (linguist George Lakoff’s aptly applied metaphor) is probably whacko.

Notably absent in the current debates are Trump’s advocates among the very wealthy and powerful who earlier expressed support for what they had hoped, despite Trump’s campaign bluster, would be a post-election windfall. They had forgotten that Donald Trump is and always has been a con man, not a businessman. Without the Trump family fortune and name as a springboard, he’d still be renting substandard housing in New Jersey. Door to door. Or doing reality TV, his apparent forte.

Simply speaking, President Trump, though still maintaining his busy schedule of golfing and post-election campaign stops, has outlived his welcome. The press, politicians of both parties, and the people all agree: Donald Trump must go. Or at least, be quarantined, made irrelevant. Trump’s shocking, bombastic, pro-Nazi rhetoric in response to the unforgivable events in Charlottesville has driven his approval ratings to an historically low point for any President. Americans of all stripes are crying for relief — now. The very legitimacy of the prevailing social order is at stake. Plus, special prosecutor Robert Mueller III’s investigation of Trump’s finances and relations with Russian and financial oligarchs of all nationalities, given the evidence Mueller has to work with, could utterly fracture the Republican Party and destroy the Republicans’ electoral chances in 2018, as did Nixon’s forced resignation in 1968.

In response, many within Congress are calling soto voce for Trump’s impeachment— and many more quietly considering the need. But impeachments take time, encourage political grandstanding and gamesmanship, and their outcomes are uncertain. Plus, would a Pence presidency really be an improvement, simply because the former governor is Midwest-sparse with his words and dines as a couple only with his wife? Though he might serve the Republicans’ immediate need for a Trump replacement, such a stark fundamentalist and a ruthless politician — Pence devised Indiana’s hideous, draconian policy of ending healthcare for the unemployed — would not provide the relief for which the American people are wanting.

A more immediate, practical solution, without too terrible side effects — the one apparently implemented over the last six weeks — has been to confine Trump, limit him, constrain him from invoking further damage. Fearing the worst, the most powerful political, business, and agency interests have conspired to quarantine President Trump. Henceforth, according to this plan, he will be America’s crazy uncle muttering in the Oval Office, tweeting to a declining ultra-nationalist constituency, rendered politically impotent except as a robot signer of Republican bills: a weird figurehead and his screwball crew, consigned to the cable deck, doomed eternally to recount the past and never again afflict our future.

So long as the coup coalition restrains Trump, calm may return to America. The imposition of the quarantine, evidenced in the defection of business leaders, the refusal of the American military to implement (tweeted) gender policy, and the appointment of three generals and a handful of reliably conservative politicians and business persons to run the agencies of government is not entirely unwelcome. Avoiding a possibly world-destroying nuclear confrontation will be enough to warrant the change, if not justify it.

Also, without Trump constantly threatening congressional Republicans with defeat in 2018 if they oppose his reactionary (and now it’s obvious, racist) policies, the Republicans may finally come to their senses and start legislating responsibly, even across the aisle. We might also look forward to the taming or replacement (by Trump, under congressional duress) of the administration’s reactionary wild cards like EPA head Scott Pruitt, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and even Attorney General Jeff Sessions (who’s already been a lightning rod for Trumpian fury, apparently a chastening experience).

And finally, as the need for impeachment recedes, the likelihood of a Pence presidency, dangerous because it would be smarter in its nefariousness than the preceding buffoonish Trump administration, will thankfully decline. But it’s a stop-gap. It means a lot of bad things can still be done by the Congress and the remaining Administration crew, and a lot of necessary, good things will not get done.

But there is a lurking danger in this course of events: it is fundamentally undemocratic. After all, a crazy President can be removed by a Congress with the courage to carry out its constitutional mandate to protect the nation. A coup cannot be replaced. Until it steps aside voluntarily or as history more often requires, is forced to relent, it’s in power to stay.

The result so long as Trump remains incarcerated behind invisible bars will be a dangling conversation about the nature of governance and democracy in America, resembling Germany’s confused politics within the Weimar Republic. Trump, a symbolic martyr in virtual exile, could issue (with help from his fellow inmates) a new manifesto, an American Mein Kampf blessed with presidential authority. At the first sign of a general crisis — political, military, economic, or even climatic — the President could stir up his bully boys, provoking a potentially violent outcome in the streets.

Conversely, having narrowly escaped nuclear annihilation and internal disintegration, the American nation could find its way to “pardoning” Trump if he resigns, then set about solving more pressing problems — among them, social divisiveness, economic stagnation, inequality, and longstanding national policies resulting in unfair taxation, inadequate regulation, and misspending of resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many. A kind of social democracy could finally take root in a nation that can exist on nothing less. This may be a dream, but people roused from deep sleep often have sharp recollections of what needs doing.

After years of political lethargy, Americans are finally confronted with social realities and the need to grapple with creating a modern democracy that works in an age of information, global phenomena, rising aspirations at home and abroad, and shared challenges and opportunities, environmental as well as social. For that silver lining, we can be thankful to King Donald the First who, in his short reign showed us how necessary it is for us to resist tyranny and simultaneously revisit and revise our democracy, our Constitution, and their outcomes to make them more compatible with our hopes and our dreams.