× Expand Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call/AP Images A hopeful vision: For the first time in far too long, it’s starting to feel like we might be able to find our way out of the nightmare of the last three years.

We’ve all experienced that moment of hopelessness in the depths of a cold or flu: “I’m going to feel this way forever.” Even if our rational mind knows it isn’t true, we find ourselves thinking that our misery will keep holding us in its grip and normal will never return. If the illness is overwhelming enough, we can barely imagine it receding.

But then there comes another moment, perhaps after a good night’s sleep, when we’ve crossed the valley and things begin to improve. Normal will return after all, we realize. We have a ways to climb, but we’ll get there.

That may just be the moment we’ve arrived at right now in the Donald Trump era. Since so much of our political life for the past few years has been so miserable, it might be worthwhile to imagine what might occur if last week actually heralds a turn toward the light. I offer this not as a prediction of the most likely future, but as a hopeful vision of what could occur in the best of circumstances.

It begins with the impeachment inquiry that Democrats authorized last week. As fearful as many Democrats were that public opinion wouldn’t follow them, the first poll already shows a majority of Americans supporting the inquiry. With the fact that Donald Trump tried to coerce a foreign government into aiding his re-election campaign pounded home again and again, the number of Americans favoring at least continuing the investigation will probably keep rising.

Even if the basic facts are straightforward, more revelations will arrive, from the efforts of both lawmakers and journalists. On Friday, for instance, we learned that in 2017 President Trump explicitly told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador that their interference in the 2016 election was just fine with him. Then on Sunday, Fox News, of all places, reported that in addition to the gloriously erratic Rudy Giuliani, President Trump employed two other private attorneys, Joseph DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, to aid in the effort to find dirt on Joe Biden from Ukraine.

Trump’s defenders have been unable to explain why, if the ludicrous cover story that Trump was pressuring Ukraine only because of his deep concern about corruption were actually true, he would do it not through, say, the State Department, but by dispatching private attorneys. Their desperate attempts at spinning away his misdeeds will likely become no more skillful or persuasive.

We will continue to learn more as government officials, seeing the writing on the wall, spill what they know to reporters and congressional committees. What they reveal will make Trump’s indefensible behavior all the more obvious and politically damaging to Republicans everywhere.

Then there will be a vote in the full House, and Donald Trump will almost certainly become only the third president in American history to be impeached.

Mitch McConnell will do whatever he can to make Trump’s trial in the Senate as brief and painless as possible (though he won’t, apparently, refuse to hold a trial at all). But by then it will be too late; the vote, in which all Republicans will probably stand behind Trump, is a foregone conclusion, a formality. What will matter is everything that was revealed along the way, and the fact that while the system may not have “worked” in the sense of purging the poison, it will at least have made a vital statement, for the public and for history: Trump’s activities were beyond the pale, and no president who acts in this way should remain in office.

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Meanwhile, Trump will react to the whole episode, as he has been doing already, in the most juvenile, impulsive, and hateful way possible, reinforcing everything everyone already understands about him.

To continue on our optimistic journey, the 2020 election will of course be about health care, the future of the economy, climate change, and other vital policy issues, but above all it will be a referendum on the most corrupt and dishonest president ever to befoul the Oval Office with his presence. Polls regularly showing significant majorities of Americans repulsed by him will turn out to be largely correct, as his inevitable campaign of race-baiting fails to win over many new converts. The Democrat will win by a comfortable margin, and bring along congressional majorities as one Republican after another (I’m looking at you, Susan Collins) pays a price for their support of Trump.

Then the Republican Party will tear itself to pieces trying to assign blame for the whole debacle. Was it the fault of those who were insufficiently loyal to Trump, or those who so enthusiastically destroyed their own reputations to become pathetic lickspittles to this most debased of presidents? It will take years to resolve, with the most immediate effect being the merciful end of Mike Pence’s presidential ambitions.

For a decade to come, every Republican will be forced to explain their embarrassing words and actions through the Trump years. A suspicious number of them will claim that they opposed Trump all along. The public won’t buy it.

Although the hatreds and resentments Trump exploited will not disappear, they will not for the foreseeable future be so powerful as to seize control of the nation’s institutions of power. And because of all that Trump’s abuses revealed about the vulnerability of those institutions, we will see the passage of new anti-corruption measures strengthening the system against a future Trump.

As for the man himself, he will be branded forever as the one thing he worked his whole life to avoid being known as: a loser. He will keep bleating on Twitter as he fends off investigations into his lifetime of criminality, and finds himself uninvited to Republican celebrations and national commemorations. But fewer and fewer people will pay attention. With his reputation in tatters and no one seeking to buy his influence, even his business will wither. Sarah Palin, a kindred spirit in so many ways, will call him to commiserate.

Is it too much to believe that all this will come to pass? Perhaps. But none of it is fantastical or outside the realm of possibility. We should remember how one act of courage leads to another and another, and before you know it everything changes. A single government employee decides to blow the whistle, then a group of freshman members of Congress comes out in favor of an impeachment inquiry, then dozens of other members come off the fence, and within a few days the tide of history has shifted. Resistance is contagious.

For the first time in far too long, it’s starting to feel like we might be able to find our way out of the nightmare of the last three years. There’s nothing wrong with a little hope.