Just nine more days...

The President-elect is as crazy as a loon, and his transition team would seem to be a bunch of rank amateurs, and yet they have done some chilling things to consolidate power. Ordering our diplomats to come home by Inauguration Day is just one of those things.

We are in one of those fixes. Trump, although he lost the popular vote by three million, won according to the rules, strange as those rules are. We are hurtling toward the swearing-in of a president who has shown his dictatorial nature in a recent press conference (only the most recent example), who really does not know what he is doing, who is obviously mentally unbalanced.

Now, in deference to Trump's legal election win, we all seem to be in a trance, going through the motions as though this were a normal election transition. We are performing the duties assigned to us as citizens of a republic. The process has a momentum that carries the country along because interrupting the process would amount to a violation of the democratic process.

But allowing Trump to assume office will result in severe damage to democracy. It cannot be allowed to happen. This is all complicated by the fact that Trump's party has majorities in both houses of Congress. Can one even imagine the House of Representatives impeaching the man? I can't imagine it. There are some Republicans in the Senate who want to investigate Russia's role in influencing the 2016 election, but Senate Republican leadership -- Mitch McConnell -- seems determined to keep any meaningful investigation from happening.

I have no idea what sorts of back room plots, if any, are being hatched to stop this fascist. I don't know how he can be prevented from taking office. All of the fantasies I have entertained since November 8 -- Electoral College revolt, Senate confirmation of President Obama's Supreme Court pick -- have failed to come true.

All citizens and politicians who see the danger for what it is must resist with all our might every step of the way.