Appointing Robert Mueller to independently oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into possible coordination between the Russian government and Trump’s campaign is the first step to ending this Sisyphean election cycle, but it is only one step. We should expect the investigation itself to be quite long; Mueller is not a man to be rushed into hasty decisions, and investigations of this magnitude have typically been measured in years, not months.

But while this scandal might be the size of Watergate, I expect it to take the shape of Iran-Contra. The massive blast radius of Watergate often clouds the fact that it was a set of crimes carried out by breathtakingly stupid, arrogant and unlucky men. The purported aims were the same (stealing an election), and the president may have engaged in obstruction of justice; for now, that is where the comparisons end.