We’ve seen this effort from the very beginning of the Trump presidency. In fact, Rep. Maxine Waters was calling for Trump’s impeachment before he even took office. She’s also called for impeaching Mike Pence once Trump has been impeached. She’s always thinking ahead.

Rep. Waters got a little carried away with herself the other night, telling an audience that she was so inspired she would “go and take Trump out tonight.” That’s what Democrats used to call “eliminationist rhetoric” back when they could use that phrase to attack Republicans. Now that Democrats are using it about Trump, it’s all just a silly misunderstanding. Here’s Rep. Waters explaining herself on CNN. She claims she was merely talking about impeachment:

This week Waters has been joined by billionaire Tom Steyer who is spending $10 million on a national TV ad campaign in which he calls for Trump’s impeachment. According to Steyer, Trump’s firing of FBI director Comey (something many Democrats were for before they were against it) means he should already have been impeached for obstruction of justice. Again, here’s CNN airing the billionaire Democrats’ pet political project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl52nvKQDk8

The incident that took place earlier today in which a far-left activist named Ryan Clayton threw Russian flags at Trump and shouted “Trump is treason!” is a stunt aimed at giving attention to this same movement. Clayton’s group, Americans Take Action, is also pushing Trump’s impeachment. In an interview with Cenk Uygur in March, Clayton described his group as, “the leading edge, the tip of the spear of the impeach-Trump resistance.” If I had to speculate I’d say Clayton’s role in performing these stunts is to get people talking about this and also to expand the Overton Window to the extreme left (“we should be talking about treason!”) to help make impeachment sound like a more moderate, responsible alternative.

There’s plenty of unhappiness with Trump on the right as well as the left this week, but the fact remains this renewed push for impeachment by the far left is a serious upping of the partisan ante. Progressives and their cohorts in the media were terribly concerned about foreign wars during the Bush years but the moment Obama was elected we stopped hearing about all the grim milestones and the street protests stopped. In the same way, all of the energy for “respecting norms” we’re currently hearing from the left will evaporate the moment their candidate is in office. Impeachment seems like a very dangerous path for the country to travel. Democrats are playing with fire in a room full of dry tinder.

Update: I almost forgot about this. Larry Flynt’s full-page ad published in the Washington Post just over a week ago offering $10 million for information leading to Trump’s impeachment.

“$10 MILLION FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO THE IMPEACHMENT AND REMOVAL FROM OFFICE OF DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Flynt, best known as the publisher of the pornographic magazine Hustler, outlined numerous reasons he felt President Trump needed to be removed from office, charging him with everything from “compromising domestic and foreign policy with his massive conflicts-of-interest global business empire” to “telling hundreds of bald-faced lies” to “gross nepotism and appointment of unqualified persons to high office.”

That was why, Flynt wrote, he was seeking information from anyone who could provide a “smoking gun” — perhaps buried in Trump’s tax returns or in some other investment records — that would lead to his impeachment.