You can’t say Donald Trump had a better year in 2018 than in 2017, nor can you say he had a worse year. Trump dwells outside the conventional definitions of Good or Bad. On the one hand, he suffered a lot of setbacks this year, but, on the other, he triggered fewer media freak-outs—maybe two a month instead of four. That’s progress, in a way.

In the big picture of things that matter, Trump stopped frightening the planet over North Korea and became buddies with its dictator. That was much safer for the planet but didn’t improve his ratings a lot. Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t drop any Russia revelations but did indict Trump associates for other things, and Trump handled his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin poorly. The midterm elections left Republicans in charge of the Senate, but put Democrats in charge of the House. Trump signed a bipartisan criminal-justice reform bill and withdrew troops from Syria, both moves that should have been appealing to the left and the Rand Paul right. But the criminal justice bill got minimal attention, and leaving Syria triggered far more outrage in the press than entering it ever did. So who knows where Trump really stands? Again, Good and Bad in Trumpland don’t follow normal rules.

Regardless of the strange metrics of the moment, it’s time once again to preview some coming repulsions. We can’t predict much, but we can point to five major headaches that will afflict Donald Trump and the rest of us in 2019.

Trump will have a weakened hand on immigration.

I’ve argued—at the risk of egg-to-face outcomes—that Trump’s latest wall push would fail. A bill that would fund it has passed the House, but Senate Democrats will filibuster it, and Trump has already declared he owns the shutdown. That’s a weak position. Every immigration ace that Trump held in his hand has already been tossed away, and, with Republicans having lost the House, any deal he cuts will have to satisfy a percentage of Democrats, who will never agree to the enforcement measures that wavering Republicans would have accepted. Failing to deliver on immigration means failing to deliver on what mattered most to his base. That bodes ill for 2020, too.

Robert Mueller will issue a nasty report.

If Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen or George Papadopoulos, among others, were part of some criminal conspiracy with Moscow, they would have been indicted for it and then received leniency in exchange for their help in unraveling the plot. Instead, they have been indicted for different crimes and, in some cases, already served their time. This is how we can say, with near-certainty, that no great Russia plot is on the cusp of being revealed. Nevertheless, Mueller has had almost unfettered access to the hampers of everyone in Trumpland, and, to judge by his indictments, he seems determined to make the most of it. That means he’ll put out a report detailing many of the unsavory things he has found, and, since we’re talking about people like Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, not to mention Donald Trump, he should have a decent buffet.

Once Mueller’s report hits, news outlets, especially broadcast ones, will crank the volume to 11. People will be shocked, shocked by this or that revelation. The cries of Trump-must-resign will he deafening, and some Republicans will start to waver and distance themselves from the president. While most of the ruckus will settle down after a couple of weeks, and odds are that Trump will pull through, those weeks will feel like an eternity to the White House and to Republicans on Capitol Hill. Trump will be at his lowest ebb.