About four years ago, the idea of a president not named Clinton or Rubio or Bush seemed almost fanciful, so it’s a tribute to human adaptability that all of us can read, without a change of pulse, that drug offender Alice Johnson has had her sentence commuted as the result of a plea made by Kim Kardashian during an Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump. And we count it as the week’s good news.

Less good has been the news that Trump has chosen to behave disrespectfully to close allies, to skip out early on a G7 meeting, and to pick a fight with Justin Trudeau; that he has been working to weaken Obamacare further, declaring parts of the health-care law unconstitutional; and that his power of pardons, with the exception of Johnson, has been exercised in stingy, partisan, and haphazard fashion. Last week, Trump cleared the name of Dinesh D’Souza, one of the right’s most cynical and dislikable actors, for reasons that looked like nothing more than cronyism. It was altogether fitting that Ted Cruz, widely lauded as the Senate’s champion of dislikability, should have turned out to be D’Souza’s advocate.

In the category of we-don’t-know-yet news, we’re seeing Trump flying to Singapore to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Monday. Three-quarters of Washington seems to be hoping it will fail: Republicans because they hate North Korea, and liberals, including most pundits, because they hate Trump. Even Democrats are attacking Trump from the right over the upcoming meeting, either a gesture of cynicism or of sincere inflexibility. But a cessation of the Korean War and a Korean re-alignment, possibly as a counterweight to China, could be a triumph for both peace and realpolitik, regardless of what happens to the weapons.

As Trump does all of these things—strange, unconventional, un-presidential—one overarching question seems to loom larger and larger: what do we do after Trump? When the Trump presidency ends, at the latest in 2025, we’ll have to confront all the precedents he has been breaking, or setting. A race to the bottom becomes a serious possibility, and preventing it becomes an overarching challenge.

It’s easy to imagine, for example, a Democratic president succeeding Trump and choosing to break rules in many of the same ways: disregarding blatant conflicts of interest, permitting nepotism in hiring, using the power of pardons as a partisan tool, attacking the justice system when it goes after the White House for anything, or just igniting culture wars on turf that favors the left just as Trump does on turf that favors the right. Blue America could, with reason, say to Red America, “How can you complain over this when you stayed silent over the same shenanigans coming from Trump?” Unfortunately, it’s just as easy to imagine a Republican successor who continues many of Trump’s worst practices. Either way, things could escalate fast to institutional chaos. We’re already a lot closer to that than we should be.

For Trump’s example to be disowned would require him to mess up seriously. This leaves us with an ugly dilemma: if Trump enjoys a lot of success, then he spawns many imitators. If he fails, then the country is severely harmed. To flesh this out, imagine that the economy stayed robust, deficits shrank, North Korea became a friend, the country stayed at peace, and Trump were forced to withdraw from politics after his first term. We’d see a legion of Trump wannabes, most of them glomming onto his worst traits. On the other hand, imagine that we were plunged into recession and armed conflict and Trump served a full eight years. We’d see a repudiation of Trump, who’d become another George W. Bush, but the country would be a mess.