‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” America today is proof of TS Eliot’s assertion. The US is riven by competing media-created realities and led by a reality TV star. Result: the society seems to be coming apart.

But on Tuesday a reality that is based in fact and evidence asserted itself – with the simultaneous, split-screen announcements of guilt of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in a Virginia courtroom, and his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in New York. This demonstrated that, for all the fear that the US is on some irreversible glidepath to authoritarian autocracy, the reality is that enough of its legal institutions still function. We are not there yet.

There has been a sea change. Last August, anti-Trump forces – in other words, the majority of Americans – mistook wishful thinking for reality. It seemed the president was on the rocks. After the Charlottesville outrage, he wouldn’t condemn the white supremacists who caused murder and mayhem. The outcry was enormous. He had to fire Steve Bannon. He was openly feuding with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. It seemed Trump couldn’t last another month.

But he not only survived, he brought the Republican party completely under his thumb.

This August is different. A white supremacist rally in Washington to mark the Charlottesville anniversary mustered only around two dozen participants. Sessions is still being attacked by Trump, but he is much more aggressively asserting his independence and that of the justice department.

And despite persistent rumours that Trump will fire Robert Mueller from the investigation into links between Trump’s election campaign and Russia, the special counsel is still at work and the legal process is far from finished. Mueller is building his case in the classic fashion that Trump’s current consigliere, Rudy Giuliani, used in the 1980s when he made his reputation as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. That’s the same office that investigated Cohen – Mueller cleverly handed off that portion of the investigation – and got him to plead guilty to breaking campaign finance laws when paying hush money, at Trump’s request, to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.

Mueller is prosecuting the small fish and getting them to flip on those further along the Trump regime food chain by offering reduced jail time.

The president understands what is going on. He was on the make in 1980s New York, vying for celebrity coverage in the city’s tabloids with Giuliani as the latter took down, first, the mafia and then Wall St insider-trading legend Ivan Boesky. Giuliani, too, cast his net wide and worked his way to the main man. Trump knows he’s in trouble. That’s why he went on Fox News on Thursday, bleating: “I have seen it many times. I have had many friends involved in this stuff. It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal.”

But it isn’t. From the founding of America, checks have been put in place on presidential power. The legislative branch of government – the Congress – is set up in the constitution to be the equal of the executive, for example. This doesn’t always work: today’s legislative branch, with Republican majorities in both houses seemingly in thrall to Trump, has ceded its authority. But, over the centuries, other checks have been created, such as the statutes establishing independent special prosecutors such as Robert Mueller.

There is also the power of the individual, patriotic citizen. The Watergate scandal might not have reached its conclusion if Judge John Sirica, a conservative Republican, hadn’t forced the handover of the tapes that provided the evidence to convict all the president’s men and force Richard Nixon’s resignation.

In the unfolding story of the Trump presidency, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein is playing that role. After his boss, Sessions, recused himself, he appointed Mueller and gave him a brief to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election “and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”. (Sessions, who worked on Trump’s campaign, twice met the Russian ambassador while it was going on.)

How long will it be before Mueller focuses on the president's finances and how many connections to Russia they reveal?

The events of the past week make it easier to see the new reality facing Trump. Mueller, via Manafort, is moving inexorably towards the meeting between representatives of Trump’s campaign and the Russians at Trump Tower on 9 June 2016. Manafort was there. So were the president’s son Donald Jr and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Don Jr has already been caught in a lie about the meeting. Trump himself has tweeted acknowledgement that the meeting was about finding dirt to use on Hillary Clinton.

So far, Mueller has not interviewed the young Don. But how long can that last? And, since his brief empowers him to look at “any matters”, how long will it be before he focuses on the president’s finances and how many connections to Russia they reveal and whether his tax returns contain false statements.

You can’t fast-forward reality and Mueller may well end up getting fired before he uncovers all the facts. Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the special counsel investigating Watergate, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. But, in the end, Nixon still had to resign and it seems clear, after last week, that the game is also up for Trump, not right away but in a future that is coming into focus more clearly.

Not that Trump’s departure will make the US whole. He is the end product of 40 years of social and civic disintegration. The Republicans are no longer a modern political party but a faction. James Madison, a primary author of the US constitution, defined faction in The Federalist Papers as, “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community”.

The Republican majority in Congress and those in control of most state governments govern only on behalf of themselves, not the whole community.

But there is a real event on 6 November that may shake them: the midterm elections. The polls are beginning to indicate that the results will be a reality they will find absolutely too much to bear. And that’s when the countdown for Trump will begin.

Michael Goldfarb is an author and broadcaster and hosts the FRDH podcast. www.goldfarbpod.com