President Trump is not moving on. He is not getting over it. In the eight days since his acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate, Trump has shown all too clearly what he took from the experience of being the third President in American history to be impeached and tried. On Wednesday, marking the one-week anniversary of the Senate’s preordained verdict almost to the minute, reporters asked Trump what lesson he had learned from impeachment. His response was “that the Democrats are crooked . . . that they are vicious, that they shouldn’t have brought impeachment.” On Thursday, the President attacked Mike Bloomberg, John Kelly, a juror who voted to convict Roger Stone, Robert Mueller, and his own “Justice” Department. (Trump’s quotes, not mine.) And that was just before noon. Through it all, he has been carrying out a purge of those who figured, in ways large and small, in the impeachment and threatening to root out additional dissenters in his midst. “We want bad people out of our government!” the President tweeted on Thursday morning.

The level of alarm about Trump’s post-acquittal rampage has been predictably high—five-alarm-fire, red-siren-for-our-democracy high. Trump may have gone too far even for one of his most stalwart loyalists. In a striking interview with ABC News, released on Thursday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr broke with Trump over the President’s public demand that the Justice Department change its recommended prison sentence for Stone, Trump’s friend and adviser, who was convicted of lying to Congress and of other offenses that came out in the Mueller investigation. Barr denied overruling his own prosecutors in response to the President and agreed that Stone’s sentence should be reduced, but then he let loose on Trump, anyway. Trump’s tweets, Barr said, “make it impossible for me to do my job.” What’s more, he added, in a swipe at the President, “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.” Democrats, understandably, were more inclined to say “I told you so” than to give Barr the benefit of the doubt. He has, after all, been a willing accomplice in Trump’s assertion of essentially unlimited executive powers, and he only seems to be speaking out now because his own credibility has been questioned. Still, for many, the rare rebuke of Trump from his Attorney General will only underscore the grim fallout from the Senate acquittal: a President so unhinged that even Bill Barr says he is out of control.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats were already furious with their Republican colleagues about the acquittal, to a degree that I can’t recall having witnessed in my decades of observing congressional politics. They accuse G.O.P. senators of having enabled and facilitated Trump’s “Personal Retribution Tour,” as Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, termed it. “He’s unleashed,” Brown said. “The lesson is he can do whatever he wants, abuse his office, and he’ll never, ever be held accountable.” When the President, on Thursday, publicly demanded that the governor of New York drop lawsuits and other “harassment” against him—even as the Trump Administration has banned New Yorkers from joining the federal government’s “trusted traveler” program—it was an almost uncanny parallel to one of the post-acquittal scenarios that the House impeachment managers had warned about. If Trump was allowed by the Senate to withhold nearly four hundred million dollars in congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine, their trial brief warned, what was to stop him in the future from demanding that individual states “perform personal political favors” or else face federal wrath? Democrats were defeated, but Trump’s post-trial vindictiveness has left them feeling vindicated. “Like we warned,” Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, tweeted, “acquittal has turned out to be a green light for him to take a wrecking ball to democracy.”

So will we remember Trump’s February 5th acquittal as the date when everything changed in America? Did Republican senators end impeachment only to begin something even more dangerous and divisive for the country?

I found myself thinking a lot this week about my experience of covering the former Soviet Union and watching aspiring authoritarians in action. Before Vladimir Putin refused to give up power, despite the Russian Constitution’s two-term limit, two senior Bush Administration officials told me that he would not do so, simply because Putin had personally assured them that he wouldn’t. These same officials believed that Putin would never arrest Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, until he did. They also believed that Putin would never renationalize Khodorkovsky’s oil company. But he did that, too.

In Azerbaijan, in 2003, I watched thousands of protesters in the streets on the night of a rigged election, in which Ilham Aliyev, the widely derided playboy son of the country’s gravely ailing dictator, received an implausible seventy-seven per cent of the votes. Western observers condemned the balloting as neither free nor fair, but the real insight for me came the next day, while I was flying back to Moscow. On the plane with the Russian election-observation team, which had seen nothing to object to, I wondered why Aliyev and his ruling party had seemed to go for such overkill, such an obviously fake result, rather than stealing the election with a more credible fifty-five per cent. One of the Russians laughed at me, saying, in effect, that the overkill was the point. That’s how power works around here. Strength lies in forcing people to accept the unacceptable. Aliyev, incidentally, remains in charge to this day.

Neither Putin’s bald decision to rewrite the rules so that he could stay in office nor Aliyev’s election fraud were in the least bit surprising to their subjects. But they were important moments, nonetheless. Blowing through previously established rules and norms matters. Having suffered no consequences for such acts, leaders move on to bigger and more audacious targets. The appetite grows while eating, as the Russian saying goes.

Still, this isn’t Russia, and, for Trump-watchers, there was a notable familiarity to the week of mayhem that followed the President’s acquittal. Although it is often difficult to look back when so much is happening each day, Trump has been nutty and angry before, ranting and vindictive, blasting norms and lying with abandon. Trump has been insulting his enemies and wreaking vengeance and claiming the “absolute right” to do things that he does not have the absolute right to do—for years. The Washington Post counted more than sixteen thousand lies, misstatements, and untruths from the President—before a single senator voted to acquit him. Months before he hijacked U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine, in service of his personal political interests, he ordered the U.S. military to the Southern border to combat a nonexistent “invasion,” only days in advance of the 2018 midterm elections. Is this time really different?

The answer, I’m afraid, is yes. In his post-impeachment rage, Trump wanted vengeance, and he wanted us to know it. There was no one inside his Administration to stop him. A month ago, Congress had at least the theoretical power to do something about his overreaching. Today, thanks to the Senate’s very clear vote, it does not. So, although the President himself is unchanged, the context around him is very much altered. In the history of the Trump Presidency, there will be a before impeachment and an after. It’s too late for lessons learned, and it’s most definitely too late for Bill Barr to complain about the President’s tweets. The constraints are gone. The leverage is lost. One ABC News interview with a single Cabinet official is not going to restore it. Trump, unhinged and unleashed, may actually turn out to be everything we feared.