Bravo to those Washington baseball fans who exercised their First Amendment right to inform Donald Trump that he’s rightly detested outside his rally cocoon. And if they’d known what was coming next on the march to impeachment, their boos would’ve been even more vociferous.

Today, for the first time, a senior White House official – a career Army officer and combat veteran, no less – is talking to House impeachment investigators. Another shoe is dropping. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council official who oversees Ukraine policy, is testifying that, yes indeed, Trump and his corrupt henchman – in Vindman’s words, “outside influencers” – sought to squeeze Ukraine for domestic campaign dirt.

He witnessed it twice. He listened in on Trump’s fateful phone call to the Ukraine president, and he saw a Trump flunky put the squeeze on some visiting Ukrainians. In his opening statement today, he says: “I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen….I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens… it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play….The request to investigate Biden and his son had nothing to do with national security.”

But those baseball fans had more than enough evidence to fuel their ire. Various pearl-clutching pundits and politicians spent much of yesterday tut-tutting that the booing and sporadic chants of “Lock Him Up” were terribly uncivil. Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, said: “We are Americans, and we don’t do not do that.” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware said, “I frankly think the office of the President deserves respect,” especially during “a globally televised sporting event.”

Actually, the televised contempt for Trump was precisely what people around the world needed to hear. They needed to hear that dissent in this imperiled democracy is still alive and well. They needed to know that there’s vocal opposition to an aspiring tyrant who has degraded the office, denounced critics as “human scum,” ceded Middle East power to Russia, and risked making America a global laughingstock.

Granted, one can reasonably argue that mocking Trump was wrong, that it was descending to his level. But dissent against tyranny is in our DNA. When the colonialists got fed up with tyrannical King George III, they revolted. Booing Trump at a ballgame – a unique opportunity, since he rarely leaves his bubble – was the least we could do. I say “we,” because it just so happens that those fans were in sync with majority national sentiment. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that the boos were no big deal, coming from “the leftist DC fan base,” but Fredo apparently didn’t know that the Nationals’ fan base draws heavily from Virginia (a once solidly red state) and that, according to the latest Gallup poll, 52 percent of Americans want his daddy impeached and removed.

Bottom line: We Americans, when confronted with a serially corrupt president on the cusp of impeachment, are free to express the fury we feel, in the spirit of the Constitution he has never read. Indeed, this morning, he deserves a new round of boos for his panicky tweet that assails Lt. Col. Vindman as “a Never Trumper.” (There’s no such evidence.) Trump is free, of course, to seek refuge at a MAGA rally, where acolytes cheer every lie and nary a boo comes his way. At least there, the emperor still wears clothes.