The headline in The Hill made me gasp momentarily: Jan. 6 panel signals interest in whether Trump committed crime.

What kind of country, I asked myself, would treat this as a debatable question? We had an election. The president clearly lost. He refused to concede. He tried to corrupt election officials in several states. He replaced people in key positions in the Pentagon and attempted to do so at the Justice Department in the hope that they would help him stay in power. He lied to the American people about the integrity of the election and encouraged them to come to Washington DC to “Stop the Steal.” And then he told them to go down to the Capitol while Congress was counting the Electoral College votes and “fight like hell” to prevent the official transfer of power. A riot ensued in which dozens of police officers were wounded, several deaths occurred, the Capitol’s defenses were breached, protestors overran the congressional chambers, the vice-president and Speaker of the House were hunted, and millions of dollars in property damage resulted.

Did the president commit a crime, we ask?

If you’re trying to find the right statutes to cite for the prediction of Donald J. Trump, maybe I can sympathize. It’s not like anyone really anticipated something quite like January 6 and wrote laws that would directly apply. We have a system where, like it or not, Richard Nixon’s declaration that it’s “not a crime if the president commits it” is truer than it should be.

But we’re talking about a crime every bit as serious as the secession of the Southern states from the Union in 1860. Abraham Lincoln could have thrown his hands up and said that there was no specific statute that spelled out what to do, or giving him authority to fight to bring the South back into the fold. But he treated it as treason because that’s what it was.

All we have to do to make this plain is to imagine what would have happened if Trump’s wishes had been fulfilled and he were still occupying the White House with no authority to be there. This is a crime bigger than any mere statute, but we’re talking about charging him with “obstruction of an official proceeding.”

It was a fucking coup attempt–the most serious offense against the Constitution since the Civil War. We can argue about what to do about it, but we should be resolved that it was a crime!