In today’s Wall Street Journal, lawyer Scott Gant and political scientist Bruce Peabody have offered the most hilariously dumb essay you will read today. If that seems harsh, consider: Gant and Peabody rightly recognize the difficulties in the way of replacing Donald Trump at the top of the GOP ticket this close to election day. So they propose another way to get the country to a Mike Pence presidency:

The Constitution offers a different way forward. Under the 20th Amendment, the newly elected president’s term begins at noon on Jan. 20. A President-elect Trump could recite his oath of office and then immediately resign. Under the 25th Amendment, power would fall to his vice president, Mr. Pence. In this way, Americans inclined to vote Republican but who are unwilling to support Mr. Trump would be able to vote for him in name only, with the understanding that he was just a placeholder.

Mind you, this is Gant and Peabody’s idea of turning a looming defeat into an electoral victory! Because a Trump-Pence ticket is doomed to fail on November 8, they say, Trump should promise to resign on inauguration day and make way for Pence. And this is supposed to bring in all those swing voters who dread the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency but cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump. (People like me, in short.) But the idea does not survive a moment’s reflection. First of all, the vast majority of people who will vote for Trump in November will do so because they like Donald Trump and want him to be president. Wouldn’t a considerable number of those voters be upset, and turned away from the ticket, by Trump’s promise that he will not serve in the office they want him to occupy? The loss of those voters would subtract far more than could be gained by this harebrained gambit.

As for the rest of us, why should we trust Donald Trump to keep such a promise? Does he have a sterling record as a promise-keeper? About anything? Gant and Peabody, in the very next paragraph of their essay, explode the entire reason for writing it in the first place:

Voters might wonder whether they could trust Mr. Trump to fulfill this pledge to resign after winning the White House. The threat that Congress might impeach and remove him might blunt some of this anxiety, but only to a point. It isn’t clear, both politically and legally, that refusing to uphold a resignation pledge amounts to an impeachable “high crime” or “misdemeanor.”

That’s it. That’s all they say about the doubts one might have about this proposal. Gant and Peabody then circle back to talking about how this would work. But they have not adequately answered the question “why would this work?” Clearly it won’t. No Congress would ever ”enforce” this “pledge to resign” by using its impeachment power.

In fine, we have an idea Trump would never accept, of making a pledge contrary to his own interest, a pledge they admit he could well be expected to break, and that Congress would never enforce.

Other than that, the essay is a fine primer on the mechanics of replacing presidents and vice presidents . . .