In the first ten minutes of the debate last night, Trump announced that if elected he would name a prosecutor and put his political opponent on trial.   This is a remarkably important moment in the destruction of the American Republic.

Trump went full late-stage French Revolution last night. There’s not much distance between what Trump said last night and actual political violence against one’s opponents.  There really isn’t.  Once you call your opponent a criminal and a traitor and strip them of all collegiately and humanity, once you whip up your followers into emotional ecstasy in a very personal way against your opponent, then you are that much closer to the guillotine.

It was a great debate for those of us who want to see the Republican Party disintegrate into a 1980s-Beirut-Lebanon-state-of-nature collection of warring factions.  Trump gave his 30 percent of the vote their fan fiction moment of unloading on Hillary Clinton to her face. But, he probably just handed the senate and maybe the House to the Democrats.

Do Trump supporters think for a moment that there aren’t many liberals who wished they could have seen George W. Bush or Henry Kissinger on trial for “war crimes?”  We didn’t put Nixon on trial after Watergate. It cost Gerald Ford the presidency, but the pardon of Nixon was the right move.  Because we aren’t a nation that puts our political opponents on trial. After the Civil War, we didn’t imprison Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and other Confederates leaders. There were no show trails of humiliated and defeated slavers and traitors. Robert E. Lee lived out his remaining years as a college president, rather than being hung from a platform at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

But, Donald Trump pledged last night, if elected, to use the prosecutorial powers of the federal government to imprison his political opponent.

That statement made him look like a president, but not a president of this country.

This morning, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, former French revolutionary and show trail impresario Louis Antoine St. Just appeared on a panel with Donny Deutsch and Rudy Giuliani. Despite, having himself been guillotined in July 1794, St. Just observed that, “A nation regenerates itself only on heaps of corpses. Mika, I can promise you that after this, only patriots will be left.”

After the debate last night, Kelly Anne Conway appeared on CNN in a segment with deceased French Revolutionary, Gabriel Riqueti, the former Comte de Mirabeau. The massively corrupt and dissolute Mirabeau started the segment by noting that, “I am very tired and drunk, having spent the last 72 hours awake, eating, drinking, fornicating, and discussing political strategy.”

Kelly Anne—who emerged from two days of seclusion—looking as radiant as British Fascist Dianne Mitford—remarked, “it was a masterful performance. He took the case right to Hillary Clinton.”

Mirabeau responded that Kelly Anne had the bosom of Madame De Stael and the polemical fury of Jean Paul Marat. “If I were still alive,” he observed, “I would, as Mr. Trump might say, move on you like a bitch.”

At 9:23 p.m. eastern standard time last night, the Republican candidate for president promised to use the power of the state to prosecute his political opponent.  He threatened his opponent with jail time if she loses. Mark that down.