It is quite a sophisticated set-up, really. You'd think in principle that the courts would decide when the presidency isn't following the law, but the actual power to punish the president lives in the legislature and it makes much more sense when examined in terms of what incentives exist.
I swear I can not prepare myself anymore for the sheer hypocrisy that is about to happen in four years! You know it’s going to happen, but my issue is the theatre of it all.
It is not. The constitution allows impeachment for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors only.
Isn’t that how they got Clinton?
If the President violates the law, and Congress impeaches and convicts them, and they don’t peacefully step down, and the military/police does not remove them from office/sides with the President, we effectively have a coup and the United States as outlined in the Constitution ceases to exist.
As the risk of deflating your apparently boundless optimism, that ship has sailed. The idea you have of a country operating under the rule of law is not congruent with reality.
At that point, being the ones with all the guns, it would fall to the military to decide who they are loyal to: the Constitution, ex-POTUS, or themselves, and they will act accordingly.
But other than that, yeah, the strategy seems to be "who is going to stop us?" It remains to be seen how far he can push things because a critical majority of Republican senators will balk. For all their talk about "muh constitution" over the last few decades, they sure seem quick to abandon some basics when it's convenient. And even then it remains to be seen if he actually steps down after an impeachment conviction.
Survival of the fittest leads to dictatorship; dictatorships stagnate, because they spend all their energy only on maintaining power. They are efficient in one sense, at maintaining order. But they are centralized and limited in throughput and therefore are never dynamic systems capable of growth and innovation.
The other remedy that still technically merits a mention even if it's somewhat implausible to happen any time soon is that Congress does still have the power to impeach and remove the president. I don't see it as super likely that Republicans would turn against him at this point, since pretty much all of the internal opposition has been driven out of the party over the past decade, but I'm guessing that it also would have been almost unthinkable for Nixon to go from winning every state other than Massachusetts in 1972 to losing so much support in 1974 that his own party told him that he might as well resign rather than have more than half of his own party's senators vote with the Democrats to remove him from office[0]. Even though I think the people who voted for Trump tend to be much more passionate in their support for him, and the norms for what behavior is considered "acceptable" as a politician have expanded dramatically (not in small part from Trump himself), I think there's still an argument to be made that Trump isn't as popular as Nixon was at this point in second term, and it's at least theoretically possible to imagine a scenario where his support eroded to the point that he lost enough support to continue with what he's doing. Even if his supporters aren't ever going to turn against him, there aren't nearly as many of them that there were for Nixon, so maybe the most likely of the unlikely scenarios for this would be a large enough Democrat majority getting elected during the midterms that they (possibly along with some of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate) could remove him. (This would of course still leave Vance as president, assuming he didn't also get impeached and convicted, so he could pardon Trump, but that still removes him from power for at least couple of years, and Vance being a relatively recent convert to Trumpism doesn't seem like he'd be able to command nearly as much loyalty as Trump himself has).
As for what could actually cause something like this to take place, I have to wonder if the most likely scenario would literally be another pandemic. Not only does the previous one have a reasonable claim to being what caused him to lose in 2020, a lot of the policies he's currently enacting seem like they'd backfire spectacularly in the face of another pandemic (e.g. cutting vaccine mandates in schools, appointing Kennedy as HHS secretary when him being antivax is probably the most well known thing about him, and the recent flirting with cutting Medicaid in order to pay for the tax cuts...)
[0]: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_against_Ri...:
> During the late afternoon of August 7, Senators Goldwater and Scott and Congressman Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office and told him his support in Congress had all but disappeared. Scott told reporters afterward that they did not pressure Nixon to resign, but simply told the president that "the situation is very gloomy on Capitol Hill." Rhodes told the president he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House. By Majority Leader O'Neill's estimate, no more than 75 representatives were willing to vote against the obstruction-of-justice article. Goldwater and Scott told the president that not only were there enough votes in the Senate to convict him, but that no more than 15 or so senators were willing to vote for acquittal. Goldwater later wrote that as a result of the meeting, Nixon "knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished." That night, Nixon finalized his decision to leave office.
Do they even need to, though? If the president cannot be prosecuted for any official acts, and has the power to pardon any subordinate for ignoring the law, and to fire (and then prosecute) anyone who insists on following the law, what does the law matter?