Whitman is waiting for the task force to begin its work before talking about specific proposals. But Norm Eisen, the chairman of CREW, who was Barack Obama’s ethics czar, has also been thinking about post-Trump reconstruction, and he has some ideas.

Until now, he told me, most people assumed that no president would dare to flout norms against profiting from the office. Trump has shown otherwise. “So we need to have legislation that No. 1, requires the release of tax return information and, No. 2, requires presidential compliance, to the full extent allowed by the Constitution, with conflict-of-interest law,” Eisen said.

Eisen also suggests strengthening the power of the inspectors general, officials charged with investigating fraud and abuse in government agencies. He argues that the Office of Government Ethics — which until now has relied largely on administration officials’ capacity for shame — be given legal teeth, including subpoena power.

And he thinks we need statutes laying out what it means to comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits government officials from accepting payments or gifts from foreign governments, and which no president has ever ignored the way Trump has. “We now know there’s nothing to save us if you have a president who runs roughshod over these things,” Eisen said.

Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor and a co-author of the recent book “How Democracies Die,” cautions that new laws aren’t enough to knit together the fraying civic fabric that allowed for Trump’s rise.

“No set of rules anywhere can respond to every situation, cover every ambiguity,” he said. Even the most exacting regulations can’t compensate for bad faith and a total-war approach to politics. Our political parties are so “intensely polarized — and this polarization is being driven by Republican Party extremism — that they are willing to basically employ any means necessary to win,” Levitsky said. “As long as that’s the case, you’re going to see politicians breaking norms and skirting rules, or using the letter of the law in ways that undermine its spirit.”

This is almost certainly true, but people outside the Republican Party don’t have the power to moderate it. All they can do is forcefully rebuke it, and the banana republic governance the party has imposed on the country it purports to love. De-Trumpification would be a way to officially mark this obscene presidency as aberrant, a negative example for future generations. Like a lot of parents I know, I’m dismayed that my kids, now too little to understand what a president is, will someday study Trump in school. One of the great tasks of the post-Trump era will be ensuring that the lessons of his presidency are the right ones.