I will put this bluntly: Donald Trump has acted unpatriotically.

He has betrayed his oath to office by using his presidency for personal gain at the expense of the country. It all began with a phone call, stilted and one-sidedly reverential between Trump and the recently-elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. In this call, the President of the United States calls on the President of Ukraine to “do us a favor” after Zelensky says that Ukraine is prepared to continue cooperating for U.S.-based military and financial aid.

Essentially, Trump asks for an investigation into the Bidens while making a veiled threat to freeze American aid to Ukraine and Zelensky, stuck between a rock and a hard place, agrees.

The content of this call eventually reached an anonymous official who became a whistleblower — the impetus of this potential impeachment. According to the whistleblower’s complaint, “[t]he President of the United States […] using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election” was so disturbing that the whistleblower filed an official complaint. Here we have a traitor being denounced by a patriot, with the latter realizing that the former’s actions violated the integrity of his office and imperiled American democracy in an attempt to influence next year’s elections.

Impeachment can be defined generally as the action of calling into question the integrity or validity of something, and specifically for the United States, it is a charge of misconduct made against one in public office. Impeachment, thus, is the manner in which America can secure the probity of the presidency, something Donald Trump has been undermining since even before he was president. Not only was Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in the Muller investigation, wherein he was consequently not exonerated of conspiracy, but Attorney General William Barr still jet-sets around the world attempting to prove that the Russians were not involved in the 2016 elections when his own government colleagues have established it so.

At the present moment, the impeachment process is not severe. It is the fair and patriotic action to pursue in this case of political and democratic treachery in which the White House is seeking to cover its own wrongdoings.

And the whistle-blower — even though he has been deemed “close to a spy” and thus worthy of execution by the president — is a humble patriot who started this process of constitutional safeguarding by doing what we’re taught to when faced with suspicious circumstances: say something.

This incident, however, is largely being overlooked as “Trump being Trump,” adding to the list of things his administration has done that has been swept under the rug. The current inquiry’s credibility can only go as far as its source and their anonymity.

Simply letting “Trump be Trump” demonstrates passivity as opposed to the fierce patriotism many Republicans claim to embody. Because the President does not believe that American democracy has the capacity to confront the shady dealings within his administration, he has now drafted foreign countries to investigate his political opponents.

Actions speak louder than words, and this latest act of Trumpian egoism calls for a strong reaction: impeachment.