We already had one, though people don’t like to call it a coup. It was more the Joint Chiefs having the military remain in their barracks even though the Commander in Chief had ordered them to take arms in support of the insurrection he was fomenting.

You can sort of squint your eyes and say that, well, the military deciding to ignore the President and agree to temporarily take their orders from some members of Congress wasn’t actually a coup d’etat, since they didn’t remove anyone from office. That makes some people feel better.

“America has never had a military coup” is a pretty good thing to be proud of. But America has never had a fascist takeover by a leader who cast aside the Constitution and proclaimed himself king, either. We are in territory where the old rules and norms no longer apply.

While Donald Trump obviously has no reverence for the Constitution and the oath he swore to preserve and protect it, our generals and colonels do.

You don’t even have to resort to a technicality to assert that Trump isn’t a legitimate President. The Fourteenth Amendment is explicit, even if our government was too corrupt to enforce the Constitution’s extremely clear rules about his ineligibility.

It’s a bit more of a reach to argue that a Congress that won’t enforce the Constitution is illegitimate, and that a Supreme Court that has de facto granted absolute power to the President is illegitimate. But it’s not anything like the reach that, say, the President’s pet constitutional law scholars are making to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment’s clause defining birthright citizens doesn’t extend to people who were born here.

With enough contempt for the Constitution, and enough unpopularity – and the economic fallout from what the Trump administration has spent the last month doing is going to make him extremely unpopular – it’s not hard to see a path whereby the military decides that it’s actually their sworn duty to step in.