You remember those Saturday morning cartoons, right? Tom and Jerry running circles around each other, trying to whack and thwack and chop it all into little pieces? Everyone loved those cartoons because they were goofy and caricatured in ways that departed from the mundanity of everyday life. They were creative in the physical limits that they pushed their subjects to and they kept you guessing only in the knowledge that the next shoe to drop would be something overly zany.

Of course, the picture I just painted could as easily be the current state of American politics.

More specifically, such a picture could as justifiably call up images of what is sure to be a zany scene inside the White House at this moment. Like buzzing bees smoked from a hive, it might do some good to think of Trump as sitting within fuming, steam cartoonishly pouring out of his ears.

That's because there seems to be, by every indication, a full-on civil war within the White House itself.

This being ironic in some ways, considering that Trump's very presence as a candidate set off something of a civil war within the Republican Party. Even Karl Rove, longstanding Bush-era aficionado, and ardent conservative, made such a claim 20 months ago when the presidential election was in its final stages. And though Rove scratched little besides the surface-level tensions of the moment, his blazing headline gets it right: this is a conflict unlike any which has been seen in the modern political epoch.

A soon-to-be published book by Bob Woodward, as well as an op-ed piece released in The New York Timesby an anonymous Trump administration official say it all: there are elements actively at work within the administration to curb the President's enthusiasm. They are part of an underground "resistance" (though passionately disclaim affiliation with the similarly titled leftists) that is working to ensure the safety and security of the country by preventing President Trump, generally through covert, subtle, and tactful means, from doing anything lastingly devastating.

And though I have not lived long, I sincerely doubt that chaos of this scale has been seen since the end of the Nixon years. Not only in terms of alleged presidential misconduct (which in some senses is as old as the office itself) but in terms of sheer seismic energy; energy that very well may destroy the Republican Party as the world has known it.

Though I've suspected such a shift in alignment for a significant period of time (truly if I'm being blunt, since the summer of 2015) the compounding factors of potential Russian (and other) wrongdoing and attested to ineptitude in the face of some of the world's most complex problems seem to make it certain: Donald Trump's arrival has been a historical turning point for American politics. Perhaps even more so than figures like Ronald Reagan or Franklin D. Roosevelt that have come before him.

If we are really to talk of parties splitting and alignments shifting, then we at least have to consider Nixon's "Southern strategy" and perhaps even before that to when the country actually split along north-south lines: the American Civil War.

Now, that is not to say that I believe Donald Trump is making preparations to initiate a nationwide conflict amongst partisans. Nor does that mean I feel the need to excuse the wrongdoing of other politicians. I am still no more a fan of the Clintons than I was on November 8, 2016.

Yet, if you listen you can hear it. The avalanche hurtling down the slope, ready to smash how the politics of today is shaped. And (if history be any guide) similar shifts may come on the left as well as the right. Bernie Sanders was more than just a flash in the pan, of that much I am certain.

In a concrete context, I don't know if this means the parties actually break up as many did in the years preceding the Civil War. I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans did split into some pro-Trumpist faction and something more closely resembling traditional conservatism or the center-right more generically. Which group would keep and bear the standard of "Republican" is a worthy question, and not one likely to be settled until it actually happens.

But for now, we have the present. The present and a book by Bob Woodward, he of Nixonian fame, detailing the most lurid White House conflicts in half a century. The present and an anonymous report in The New York Times confirming much the same.

Not your typical Saturday morning cartoon at all.