“What’s it going to take for us to wake up…?” I thought I’d lived through history during the assassinations of the 1960s, the Apollo 11 moon landing, Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, September 11, and the election of the first Black president. Then came Trumpism, COVID, and the upending of constitutional order. This feels more like the end of history. Heather Cox Richardson makes history her business. She brings that perspective to Elon Musk’s nuttiness even as “the lug nuts on the wheels of the Musk-Trump government bus” seem to be coming off. Fellow historian Timothy Snyder concurs, posting, “Something is shifting. They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading.” Let’s hope. Richardson writes from Maine: Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump’s destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a “thief and a robber.” “[W]hosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command…ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by…