Folks, we’ve heard your demands for the immediate impeachment of President Donald Trump and we totally understand where you’re coming from. You think it’s our responsibility and constitutional duty to provide checks and balances on the Executive Branch and make one of the most no-brainer decisions of all time. You think we should put down the cigars we’re currently smoking with a room full of oil executives and instead impeach a president who’s constantly doing crimes out in broad daylight. Well, you are mistaken because you simply do not see the 36-dimensional chess match that we do.

Politics is a game of immense strategy and foresight, like tic-tac-toe or that game where you and your friends take turns kicking a can down the street. It requires a deft mind to predict the next move of Donald Trump, one of the most predictable men of all time. It’s not exactly easy to formulate a coherent plan of attack against a guy who eats cold cheeseburgers for every meal and who we’re not even completely sure is literate. If we impeach the president now, we risk subjecting ourselves to an infinite array of cunning, political retributions.

He might tweet some mean things about us. Or he might tell a bunch of Cadillac dealership owners at Mar-a-Lago that he’s totally innocent and being treated unfairly. Hell, he might even call into an evening cable news show and stammer aimlessly about how he’s the subject of a witch hunt. It’s impossible to know just how ingeniously this smooth operator will exploit impeachment to benefit himself. We couldn’t possibly prepare for the countless strategies he’d employ. The president will just take impeachment and spin it positively because he is a master of communication and has never fumbled over his words like a child giving a book report on a book he didn’t read.

Impeachment will only rally Donald Trump’s base of ardent racists who would already jump into an active volcano if he told them to. His voting base of zealots who openly peddle death threats and white supremacy will get even more supportive of him if we initiate impeachment hearings. If we start doing our jobs, then those supporters might even do something really crazy, like mail pipe bombs to prominent critics of the president. We would hate to activate a voting base that’s already boiling like a big, racist cauldron.

Also, there would be way too much paperwork to do in order to conduct impeachment hearings and we’d rather not have to do that. Nobody wants to do that much paperwork. Instead, we should be focusing our energy on forcing the testimony of the special counsel who specifically said he has nothing more to say apart from what’s in the report he took two years to write. This is what we in the politicking business call “the long game.” We need to keep waiting before we strike, even if it means holding off on any meaningful action until this country is nothing but ash and rubble. That’s when we’ll finally speak up. Checkmate, Mr. President.