The United States may not quite be in a constitutional crisis, but it certainly feels like one. With Michael Cohen’s guilty plea this week, and his admission in court that he paid illegal hush money to two women at then-candidate Donald Trump’s behest, the president is effectively an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to break campaign-finance laws to influence his own election. What’s more, it’s not even the plot he’s denied taking part in for more than a year.

The guilty plea by Trump’s former personal lawyer sends this presidency, and the nation, even further into uncharted waters. There’s now a deep unease across the American political spectrum, a sensation akin to the swelling hum of instruments as an orchestra warms up for its performance. Politico reported that Tuesday’s legal maelstrom “left an unavoidable impression that the walls are closing in on a president facing serious accusations of wrongdoing” among White House staffers. Elsewhere in Washington, Trump’s opponents appear to sense the advantage turning in their favor.

“Enough is enough,” New York Representative Jerrold Nadler said in a statement on Wednesday. “The President of the United States is now directly implicated in a criminal conspiracy, numerous members of both his campaign and administration have been convicted, pleaded guilty to felonies, or are ensnared in corruption investigations, and the Judiciary Committee has real work to do.” If Democrats retake the House this fall, Nadler would preside over impeachment hearings as chairman of that committee.

There is no clear path to how all of this ends. Trump’s political wounds are so grievous, and his unpopularity so thoroughly baked in for the American public broadly (just as, conversely, his popularity with Republicans is), that it’s hard to imagine how he could ever have anything resembling a normal presidency. At the same time, it’s unclear if his opponents could successfully oust him through impeachment. Many of these questions depend on the fate of the 2018 midterms, and perhaps all depend on whatever legal twists and turns come next.

Trump’s chief advantage at the moment is that he is the president. Without that office, he would be as susceptible to an indictment for criminal wrongdoing as any other American. There’s a robust debate among legal scholars on whether a president can be indicted while in office, but the question is effectively moot since it would violate current Justice Department guidelines. It’s a grim paradox that the man commanded by the Constitution to “faithfully execute” the laws of the United States is also the person who is least beholden to them.