Is this the beginning of the end?

James Comey's most devastating comment came at the end of his interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulis. Comey dismissed claims made by some that Trump is medically unfit to hold office.

"But not in the way ... I often hear people talk about it. I don't buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia. He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who's tracking conversations and knows what's going on," Comey said. "I don't think he's medically unfit to be president. I think he's morally unfit to be president."

"A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they're pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person's not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds.

"Our president must embody respect and adhere to the values that are at the core of this country. The most important being truth. This president is not able to do that. He is morally unfit to be president," he said.

Will Comey’s indictment of the moral failings of the Trump presidency, along with Michael Wolf's scathing portrait of the incompetence of the Trump administration in Fire and Fury:Inside the Trump White House,mobilize those trying to bury their heads in the sand, hoping this nightmare will just go away. In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright asked “Will We Stop Trump Before It’s Too Late?” A question on the minds of so many of us.

Comey told Stephanopoulos that he didn’t think impeachment was the answer—-that the American people had to vote Trump out of office. But that can’t happen until November 2020; there’s too much at stake to wait two and a half years. We need to vote in a Democratic House of Representatives, which can initiate articles of impeachment. Granted, at this point it’s unlikely that 2/3 of the Senate would vote to convict, but we do not know what the Mueller investigation and the investigation of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s files will uncover. Impeachment and conviction are not impossible.

The stakes are high. Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their new book How Democracies Die propose a four-part test for identifying authoritarian leaders: "rejecting democratic institutions, denying the legitimacy of political opponents, tolerating or encouraging violence and curtailing civil liberties." They note: “With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century...Donald Trump met all of them.”

This is becoming seriously scary.