It's time. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

So the Charlottesville tragedy has a tangible result at the Trump White House: chief strategist Stephen Bannon was banished two weeks earlier than expected. The Richmond, Virginia native had become a lightning rod for his white nationalist views and his inability to work well with others. But he's back on the scene, peddling his virulence at Breitbart News.

Ideally, the bloody white supremacist race riot, causing casualties in Charlottesville, should accomplish much more than that.

President Donald Trump's inexcusable outburst equating the two sides should provoke a stream of outrage that loosens Republican tongues in Congress. They are so good at being team players, Republicans, that they rarely denounce a leader of their own. This must be the inflection point, the exception that emboldens them to do the right thing.

And not just congressional leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. The whole "grand old party." If not now, when? Trump has no loyalty or love for them.

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In other words, America, rocked by what it saw, has hit a tipping point with Trump. Democratic leaders and citizens, too, have a fluid point to press to their advantage. They should step up their anger and resistance any way they can come together. There's nothing left to lose. Moral outrage, black and white, is a great way to overcome injustice, last I looked. The Women's March on Washington on Jan. 21 might be seen as a blossoming social movement.

We critics of Trump should take heart that the Charlottesville violence moved rocks and marble stone, literally overnight in Baltimore, in a former slave state. Four monuments to white supremacy were taken down by the mayor and city council's order after a long time talking about it. Robert E. Lee is no more, happily; nor is Marylander Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the United States and author of the hateful antebellum Supreme Court opinion, Dred Scott, which ruled that neither enslaved nor free blacks could ever be citizens.

Social change does not always come gradually. Historical progress often happens all at once. So does devolution. You wake up and it hits you in the face with morning coffee. Last November was like that, a blow salted and stung by the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote against Trump by nearly three million votes. In a sudden flash, Barack Obama's America was a different country. If Obama brought a social revolution as the first black president, the counter-revolution has arrived with a vengeance.

The French Revolution was bound to happen, but the fall of the king's ancient regime was hard to imagine beforehand. The Civil War had several catalysts in the 1850s, one of which was Taney's Supreme Court decision. The final one was John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry to start a slave insurrection.

Trump's psyche has no echoes in the American presidency except perhaps the private Richard M. Nixon. But Trump needs to be publicly angry at somebody at all times, like Jefferson Sessions, the attorney general, once his best friend and supporter in the Senate.

But this is perhaps the most disturbing trait in governing a democracy: Trump basks in the fury of others. In his last statement on Charlottesville, he enjoyed baiting and outraging people, even dumbfounding the press. He said afterward that he felt liberated.

That's why people of all kinds might seize this moment to galvanize peaceful resistance to the president.