Michael McMillen lives in both Portland and Brooksville. He formerly worked in government and business and currently chairs a community scholarship foundation for college students from Brooksville.

President Trump has said that the only limit on his actions is his own mind.

Take him at his word. Under his direction, and in violation of both U.S. and international law, the U.S. military has now colonized Venezuela, invading it, kidnapping its head of state, putting in place a puppet government and commandeering its oil, all under threat of additional military intervention.

According to Trump, the U.S. will control Venezuela for the foreseeable future. He has announced plans to personally control the proceeds of the sale of expropriated Venezuelan oil, with reported plans to hold the proceeds outside the U.S. Treasury, in offshore bank accounts, likely intending to enrich himself and his cronies as he has done repeatedly in similar situations during his presidency.

In addition, he has similarly threatened Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Greenland. His vice president and secretary of state recently met with the foreign minister of Denmark to discuss the future of Greenland under threat. This is extortion, pure and simple.

Greenland, it should be noted, is a part of Denmark, a fellow member of NATO and historically one of our staunchest allies. Of course, the same could be said of Canada, which has been similarly abused by Trump.

Against this background, Trump has proposed a 50% increase in the U.S. military budget, already the largest in the world by a factor of 3. What could this possibly be for if not for further conquest of other small and defenseless countries?

Trump and his cohorts have demonstrated similar disdain for the rule of law on the domestic front, kidnapping U.S. citizens off the streets, detaining and forcibly deporting immigrants without due process and now murdering Americans with seeming impunity, as happened most recently to Renee Good, a mother of three, in Minneapolis.

Not to mention sequestration by Trump’s “Department of Justice” of the Epstein files, in clear violation of a bipartisan congressional edict for their release.

What can be done to restore sanity and the rule of law to our government? Midterm elections are almost a year away and the next presidential election almost three years. The further damage Trump can do in that time is almost unimaginable.

With control of Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court, Republicans now hold all the power in Washington. Wanton destruction of our republic has happened on their watch. There has been recent pushback from a few Republicans in Congress and from the highly partisan Supreme Court. But as many have said, that pushback has been a day late and a dollar short.

Until such time as the Republican Party divorces itself from its oligarchical overlords and begins to act in the real interests of the American people, it should be boycotted by patriotic voters of all stripes. Even those who consider themselves loyal Republicans, whether from habit or conviction, should decline to support Republican candidates for government at all levels, from dog catcher to president, until the party totally repudiates Donald Trump.

At a minimum, that repudiation must take the form of impeachment in the House of Representatives and trial and conviction by the Senate. This needs to happen promptly, before Trump can start a third world war in partnership with his ally Vladimir Putin.

While global war is hard to contemplate, it is increasingly likely in light of Trump’s threats to other countries and the damage he has already done to our economy, our institutions and our standing among nations, which will take generations to repair, if we ever can.