America has a long tradition of rising up and firing those in power – so why are they taking so long to dump Trump?

How can America stand by a leader who takes two days to deliver a condemnation of those espousing racial hatred, displaying nostalgia for the evil of Nazism, and then more or less take it back one day later?

Donald Trump is used to saying 'You're fired!' to people, but will the phrase come back to haunt him? (AP)

Michael Moore, America’s left-wing, all-round loud-mouth, has a new show on Broadway. One night last week, he invited startled audience members to head outside where double-decker buses were waiting to take them to Trump Tower, just up the street. There, he and they together would essentially demand that its owner vacate his current day job, and do so pronto.

The attention-grabbing stunt – the reviews are poor – did not come before Moore had shared memories of how he had first come to prominence. At 18, he ran for the board of his high school, determined that its headmaster be fired for misconduct. He became the youngest school board member ever elected in the US. Within months, the headmaster was gone.

Moore, who is now 63, then and last week was merely honouring one of America’s most treasured traditions. It is a country, perhaps more than any other, that doesn’t wait on ceremony before dumping those in charge if they prove themselves unfit. The reasons usually fall somewhere between sheer incompetence and corruption, or outright abuse of power. (Moore considered it out of order when the head teacher took to beating him with a cane.)

If it is uniquely part of America’s DNA, perhaps that’s because of the way it came into being in the first place: they fired mad King George whose shoddy treatment of his most important colony provides the comic relief in that other, more successful, Broadway show, Hamilton.

Peculiar to America, for example, is the system of electing candidates to the bench. It’s not universal and, famously, justices on the Supreme Court can remain there until they drop dead, like Antonin Scalia. But nearly nine out of ten judges in the US face losing their jobs if the masses take against them for whatever reason. All but 11 states elect at least some of their judges.

The risk of being booted enervates. At a Kansas high school recently, pupils who suspected their new headmistress had concocted her credentials investigated the case and published the evidence in the school newspaper. She didn’t survive in the job for another day. Travis Kalanick was the CEO of Uber, the revolutionary ride-hailing company he founded, until suddenly he wasn’t, after his biggest investors held him responsible for missteps that had damaged its reputation, including in-house cases of sexual harassment and discrimination.

No one understands this better than Donald – ‘You’re fired!’ – Trump. Anthony Scaramucci lasted 10 days before being escorted from the White House grounds. He repeatedly threatens members of his own party who won’t do his bidding by encouraging voters to turn against them. Ask Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, who, like scores of others, complained last week that Trump had equated white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the KKK with the young counter-protestor killed a week ago in the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Which he had. “Disgusting lie,” Trump raged on Twitter. “The people of South Carolina will remember”. He similarly assailed another Republican senator on his shit-list, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and pledged his support for the Tea Party radical, Kerri Ward, who hopes to unseat him next year.

Trump at a Tuesday press conference in Trump Tower (AFP/Getty)

So, when it will be his turn? For all their sacking alacrity, Americans still baulk when it comes to dumping presidents ahead of time. They have done it once, of course, but the trauma of Nixon’s removal did not fade quickly. A president is not a prime minister. He is the head of state. When it comes to the commander-in-chief, the bar is apparently set higher. You can sort of see why. But the logic is back-to-front here. A president is not a school principal or the coach of a football team. They lead the most powerful nation on the planet. The bar, surely, should be lower.

Until last week, the notion of Trump departing office early was set in the context of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and his probe into the Trump campaign and Russia. Recently, I asked a top Republican if he could envisage a delegation of senior senators of their own party – among them Flake, McCain, Graham, perhaps – one day presenting themselves in the Oval Office and demanding Trump’s resignation. Yes, he said, but only if solid evidence surfaces that he has broken the law, obstructed justice, or both. Otherwise, no.

This has now become inadequate to the problem. At almost every turn since Charlottesville – since the white supremacists carried tiki torches through that once proud college town chanting, “Jews will not replace us”, since Heather Heyer was run down and killed for standing up against hatred – Trump has brought shame on himself and the whole country. How can America stand by a leader who takes two days to deliver a condemnation of those espousing racial hatred, displaying nostalgia for the evil of Nazism, and then more or less take that condemnation back one day later? When a leader’s moral core is shown to be absent, isn’t it time to abandon him?

What loyalty is due a president who reminds his supporters of his distaste for CNN by retweeting a cartoon of a train, bearing his name, running down a reporter wearing the logo of that network, just days after Ms Heyer was run down by a car? He did delete it minutes later, but not before all of us had noticed and the only word that came to mind was, "Sick". Sick man.

Maybe something is starting to stir, the full outlines of which we can’t see yet. Trump was forced to disband the two outside councils of top business leaders who were advising him on tax and regulatory reform after it became clear they were poised, en masse, to desert him. Any further association with him was simply unpalatable. And too damaging to their own reputations. Just as importantly, when Trump took back his earlier condemnation in his famously unhinged press conference in Trump Tower on Tuesday, the anchors of Fox News expressed disgust and bewilderment just as swiftly as their counterparts on the other news networks.

Republicans must now choose. They can continue to take the path of least resistance and close their eyes and ears to the latest abominations coming from lips (and Twitter fingers) of Trump or they can remind themselves of that most natural of American instincts and fire him.