Read: Trump’s guardrails are gone

The American system of government doesn’t really make any allowances for either situation, presuming both prudent leadership and conscientious respect for the chain of command. The Founders did provide a method for the removal of a runaway president, but there’s not a broad consensus on whether the president is running wild, and there seems to be little appetite in Congress for impeachment. That leaves a situation that is hazardous to the functioning of the government and the country. It is unsustainable, and yet it’s been sustained for more than two years now.

“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” Mueller notes in his report.

Considering the incidents that are detailed, it’s no wonder. Sometimes aides didn’t want to follow orders that would require them to lie—as when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein refused to say that firing FBI Director James Comey was his idea. At other times, they resisted orders that would violate government guidelines, as when then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to cancel his recusal on Russia-related matters. And in some cases, they refused to do things to protect Trump from his own worst impulses, as when then–Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told the president he’d ask Sessions to resign, but just didn’t do it.

The acme, or the nadir, of noncompliance came from former White House Counsel Don McGahn, who first refused to fire Mueller and then refused to write a letter denying that he had refused to fire Mueller. Told he might be fired, he was defiant: “McGahn dismissed the threat, saying that the optics would be terrible if the President followed through with firing him on that basis.” McGahn was right, and he wasn’t fired then.

Read: 14 must-read moments from the Mueller report

McGahn has since left the administration, though. So have Priebus and Sessions. So, too, have Defense Secretary James Mattis, who, according to Bob Woodward’s Fear, once simply decided to ignore an order to launch airstrikes; and the economic adviser Gary Cohn, who, according to Fear, swiped a letter terminating a trade agreement off Trump’s desk to avoid his signing it. In each case, the departed staffers’ decisions seem wiser than Trump’s, and the fact that the president didn’t seem to notice their sabotage doesn’t speak well to his decision making or attention span.

In the long run, Trump has become annoyed with each of these staffers and forced them out or fired them. The problem is that the results remain similar because each new round of staffers reaches the same conclusion about the president’s orders that their predecessors did. Priebus’s successor was John Kelly, who, according to Fear, deemed Trump an “idiot.” Nielsen’s successor, McAleenan, has already refused the asylum order, despite Trump’s reported promise of a pardon if he were put in jail. In some appointees, such as Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump has found aides who are more indulgent, but many lower-level bureaucrats remain resistant to orders they believe are illegal.