Longtime conservative Peggy Noonan stomps all over Trump -- and calls for a Democrat to replace him in 2020

In her weekly column for the Wall Street Journal, longtime conservative columnist Peggy Noonan expressed dismay with President Donald Trump -- saying he was given a chance to act like a president, failed and now it is time for him to go.

According to the former presidential speechwriter, Trump has been nothing but a "disruptive" force since he came to Washington D.C. after his surprise election.

"Trump supporters have long held, and deeply believe, that none of the people in what they call the swamp were ever anything but unalterably opposed to him and meant, from day one, to remove him by whatever means possible," Noonan began. "This was true of about half of official Washington. They were predominately Democrats, though there were Republicans too, and certainly the media were against him, overwhelmingly."

"But the other half of official Washington, though to varying degrees disapproving of Trump, often for reasons that were almost aesthetic, was willing to be surprised. They were open to persuasion. They didn’t say this but they thought it. They’d give him time and watch events closely," she continued, adding, "Pretty quickly and to the entire edifice of Washington, it became clear Donald Trump was not a Jacksonian shock to the system, which is what his supporters think he was. He was a daily system overload, a one-man frying of the grid. "

According to the columnist, Trump had some good people who attempted to keep him in check but were driven out by Trump insiders who she described as, "strange—fierce, emotional, half mad themselves."

"He destabilized the entire town," she wrote before delving into special counsel Robert Mueller's report which she admitted painted a devastating portrait of Trump -- but still not enough to force her to call for impeachment which she said would be interpreted as, "a cynical attempt by the left to achieve by other means what it could not achieve at the ballot box."

However, she did endorse the idea of Trump being defeated in 2020 by a Democrat.

"We elect a president in 2020. Democrats would be wise to spend the next year showing America that their party is capable of governing, up to leadership, that its ideas are not crazy but pertinent, that it actually has a philosophy," she wrote. "Seriousness and calm would be nice, and after the past few years would serve as a welcome counterpoint. There is an unarticulated wish out there to return to some past in which things were deeply imperfect and certainly divided but on some level tranquil, and not half mad."

You can read the whole thing here (subscription required).