In this most apocalyptic of presidential races, the received wisdom among liberals is that a victory by Donald Trump would represent the ultimate na­tional disaster. There’s plenty to be frightened of. He has proven himself to be a bigoted and ill-informed narcissist, and an anti-intellectual fabulist with a nanosecond attention span. He’s prone to defensive and misogynistic outbursts of aggrieved masculinity, and he gleefully manipulates the country’s most racist and xenophobic impulses for his own gain. What would happen if Trump were given authority over America’s armed forces, its nuclear arsenal, even—shudder—its tax code? The end might very well be nigh.

But what if there is a fate worse than Trump? What if, by finally vanquishing him at the polls, we only make him stronger?

For most of the summer, liberals enjoyed a respite from their nightmares of a Trump presidency. After the cheesy tin-pot spectacle known as the Republican National Convention, which had all the charms of an infomercial directed by Leni Riefenstahl, and the long Trumpian meltdown that followed, the pollsters and pundits all seemed to sing the same tune: that the Republicans were facing a landslide defeat not seen since poor Walter Mondale was sent packing in 1984. That scenario soothed bicoastal Democrats in Los Angeles and Brooklyn as they drifted off to sleep to the murmuring sounds of Philip Glass and Terry Gross. A crushed Trump, after all, would pose little threat, his lies resoundingly rejected by the American people.

But that’s probably not what we’re going to get. The election is far more likely to take a familiar shape: partisan, nasty, and a nail-biter. Hillary Clinton may well come out on top, but her victory will probably be too narrow to give her a conclusive mandate for change. And that outcome, from a certain perspective, might actually serve Trump better than winning.

As president, Trump—a con man who traffics in dark fantasy—would quickly find himself constrained by the realities of actual government. The Constitution makes it difficult to pull off the kind of Putinesque strong-arming that Trump admires. Instead, he would be forced to try, and ultimately fail, to be what he is not: a capable and measured leader, his power subject to the checks and balances of a democracy. Congress has its own political stories to tell. Supreme Court justices, unlike reality-show apprentices, can’t be fired.