Bigger disgrace: A “celebrity” calling overtly for a military coup or me pretending to care what Chelsea Handler thinks in order to wring some cheap ‘n easy Friday afternoon content out of it?

I’m surprised that we haven’t seen more of this from “the Resistance.” They’ve noodled every other means of removing Trump from office — resignation, impeachment, prosecution by Bob Mueller, even ye olde 25th Amendment pipe dream. We can’t be more than a few months away from the idea of “Lord Protector James Mattis” becoming fashionable on the left, especially since they hate Mike Pence (“theocrat!”) almost as much as they do Trump. If you want to do an end-around the president and the VP, this insanity is your only option.

To all the generals surrounding our idiot-in-chief…the longer U wait to remove him, the longer UR name will appear negatively in history.

— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) August 11, 2017

I can’t believe an hour of talking to Tomi Lahren didn’t turn her into a Trumpkin.

Stephen King was less specific than Handler but he’s also dreaming of President Pence today. Maybe coup fantasies are the new wokeness:

Donald Trump is unfit for office. Needs to be removed.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) August 11, 2017

There’s a germ of reality in Handler’s tweet in that the people around Trump, including the generals but not just the generals, are reportedly on guard to protect the president from his own worst impulses. Got a commander-in-chief who’s a bit of a loose cannon, who doesn’t sweat the details about crafting or implementing policy and who’s not overly discriminating in the “facts” he chooses to believe? Well, you’re not going to “remove” him. But maybe you’ll keep a closer eye on him than you would a different president, with a bit more gatekeeping to make sure that only reliable information is making it to his desk.

The generals, the New Yorkers and Republican congressional leaders see themselves as an unofficial committee to protect Trump and the nation from disaster…

[A]s one top official told us: “If you see a guy about to stab someone with a knife, you don’t need to huddle to decide to grab the knife.”…

The generals — White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — speak frequently, see the world similarly and privately express a sense of duty to help steer Trump. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, is an ally…

And much of what they do is silent. AP reported that Mattis and Kelly, when he was still Secretary of Homeland Security, “agreed in the earliest weeks of Trump’s presidency that one of them should remain in the United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House.”

“The Committee to Save America,” Axios calls them, which must please the president to no end. Another element of protecting Trump from self-sabotage, unstated above but clearly part of the scheme, is ridding him of personnel who might encourage what the generals regard as his worst impulses. That would explain John Kelly’s quick cashiering of Anthony Scaramucci and the recent purging of Bannonites on the National Security Council, one of whom wrote a rambling memo about “cultural Marxism” that made it to the president’s desk via Don Jr and which Trump allegedly “gushed over.” (Isn’t there supposed to be a firewall between Don Jr, who’s running the Trump Organization, and government in order to avoid conflicts of interest? Or have we already dropped that pretense?) The ensuing alt-right war on H.R. McMaster has made Steve Bannon’s position increasingly precarious among McMaster and Kelly, it seems. He and/or Sebastian Gorka may be out sooner rather than later, if Trump thinks he can get away with that without alienating right-wing populists. The higher Stephen Miller’s profile gets, the more leeway Kelly might have to bounce them.

Exit question via Peter Hasson of the Daily Caller: Here’s something Handler tweeted three days ago. Is she pro-military-state or anti?

What's happening in the state of Missouri is scary and unacceptable. If we don't speak up, this whole country could become a military state.

— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) August 7, 2017