He promised to bring back waterboarding and worse; he was easily talked out of it. He promised a Muslim ban; a much more modest travel ban is now tied up in the courts. He launched a voter fraud commission, which his critics regarded as a step toward massive vote suppression; it was ineffective and broke up. He keeps threatening to change the libel laws; they aren’t changing, and the anti-Trump press is thriving. NATO and Nafta are both still there; the trade war with China has been postponed; we are not at war with Iran or (yes, I know, yet) with North Korea; the scope of the Russia investigation has only widened since Trump’s hamfisted intervention.

Before Trump took office, it was reasonable to worry that he would fill high offices with cronies, but the real cranks have rarely lasted and many appointments have been reasonable and conventional and even boring. The president is filling the courts with Federalist Society conservatives, not his sister or Ivanka or Newt Gingrich, and his cabinet looks a lot like a generic Republican administration, whose efforts liberals understandably oppose and sometimes deplore, but which are not remotely like the workings of a fascist cabal circa 1935.

And then legislatively, the story of the Trump era so far is failure on every front save tax cuts, an outsourcing of policymaking to Hill Republicans, and a general incompetence that is bringing us yet another government shutdown. The recurrence of these shutdowns is, certainly, a symptom of the republic’s sclerosis — but it is not a Trump-specific problem, and he seems to have made it neither better nor much worse.

Now it might be argued that all of this — the balking of Trump’s authoritarian impulses, the normalcy of his appointments, his massive unpopularity and legislative failures — is due to the intense vigilance of the Resistance, the widespread determination to treat this president as an existential threat.

But I don’t think that’s right. Senate Republicans succeeded in normalizing Trump’s cabinet and judicial appointments by behaving, well, normally: Working behind the scenes to veto bad choices and elevate more conventional picks. Congressional Democrats have stalled Trump’s agenda by campaigning against its substance, as they would with any other G.O.P. president, and they are threatening to take the House and Senate by running no-fuss-and-drama candidates. The Deep State of bureaucrats and generals has prevented sudden breaks with U.S. policy not with high-profile resignations or massive acts of sabotage, but by repeatedly, patiently talking the president out of his most disruptive or dangerous ideas.

And where an abnormal response to Trump has kept things on an even keel, it hasn’t been furious protests; rather, it’s been a collective decision by many different actors, from his own appointees to his congressional opponents to foreign leaders the world over, to simply behave as if he isn’t actually the president, as if the system around him is what matters, and his expressed desires are just a reality TV performance.