What was already set up to be one of the biggest, most consequential weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency—as the commander in chief chaired a UN meeting in New York, the Capitol in Washington braced for a showdown over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—saw the intensity rise to seemingly historic levels by noon Monday, as news outlets raced to report the long anticipated denouement of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Nevertheless, the momentary firing-that-wasn’t likely marks the postponement of an impending crisis, rather than a permanent escape.

The fall of Rod Rosenstein—the man who in his first weeks in office helped justify the firing of FBI Director James Comey and then appointed Comey’s predecessor, Robert Mueller, to be the special counsel leading the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election—appeared to happen as Ernest Hemingway once said about going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.

Gradually, because ultimately it has never seemed a question of if Rosenstein would be fired, but when—and how far along Mueller would be by the time Rosenstein got canned. Reporters across Washington had prewritten “Rosenstein is fired” stories numerous times, as the tensions between the White House and the Justice Department ebbed and flowed over the last two years. (Most recently, The Wall Street Journal had actually sung the praises of the Trump-Rosenstein dynamic: “It’s fantastic,” President Trump said of their relationship in August.)

The life expectancy of the Mueller investigation status quo perhaps already numbers mere weeks.

Then suddenly, because last Friday, The New York Times reported that Rosenstein had—in those same tumultuous weeks last year following Comey’s firing—discussed possibly invoking the 25th Amendment and rousting Cabinet officials to remove Trump from office. Ironically, the article explained that Rosenstein at the time thought he could enlist then Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in the effort, who was the man Rosenstein appeared to be meeting with Monday to receive his walking papers.

Yet as quickly as the “Rosenstein is fired” news spread came just as earth-shattering news that Rosenstein would actually stay—at least until Thursday, when he would meet with the president in person. The crisis occurred, and passed, in barely the length of a Law & Order episode.

Even so, the life expectancy of the Mueller investigation status quo perhaps already numbers mere weeks; the uneasy and fragile truce that has existed between the Justice Department and the White House since the summer of 2017—where Trump freely berates Mueller on Twitter, but stops short of any action that would actively remove him—already seems ready to be upset soon.

Trump, it appears, is already making noise about breaking the truce, even if Rosenstein survives.

Rosenstein’s ouster has long been seen in Washington as Act One of Trump’s own Saturday Night Massacre: Trump would fire Rosenstein, then Mueller himself, along with perhaps any other Justice Department official standing in the way of upending the special counsel. American democracy at that point would be tested like never before, the thinking went, as the central premise of the United States, as a nation of laws, not men, was stressed by a president who has happily (and grumpily, on occasion) trampled past every norm of democracy.

Rosenstein, for his part, has hung on longer than almost anyone has anticipated, facing months of withering attacks from Trump-backing media outlets like Fox News and assaults from the presidential Twitter account that would have felled any other public servant in more normal times. It is a testament in some ways to the political acumen that had allowed him, at the time of his appointment to the Justice Department’s number two role, to be the nation’s longest serving US Attorney, spanning the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.

He also has survived where so many others have not. The toll of the Russia investigation and Trump’s administration-long tussle with the Justice Department and the rule of law already has claimed a high body count: First, there was Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, then FBI Director Jim Comey, then FBI General Counsel James Baker, then FBI Chief of Staff Jim Rybicki, then FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.