Today marks the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.

It isn’t wishful thinking to begin the countdown to Trump’s self-destruction on his inauguration day. It’s merely a statement of the facts of presidential life: this is no longer a game played out on TV and Twitter.

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Everything changes when The Apprentice star takes the oath of office on that stage outside the Capitol. Legally, politically and diplomatically, Trump’s world is utterly transformed.

What passed before as media outrage now has a measurable impact on his presidential polls and by extension his presidential power.

What passed before as a sycophantic discussion with his own attorney now opens the door to endless litigation and the clear and present danger of impeachment.

What passed before as a curious cozying up to Vladimir Putin is now transformed into a multi-agency investigation into illegal foreign payments to undermine the election.

We should not confuse populism with popularity. Trump enters the Oval Office as the weakest new commander-in-chief in living memory. Having lost the popular vote by almost 3 million, he has no political mandate to speak of. And his disastrous poll numbers are hard to overstate.

This is the high-water mark of every president’s approval ratings – before they do the tough stuff of governing and encounter one of the many fast-moving crises that pass through the West Wing. At the height of his popularity, Donald Trump is polling as badly as George W Bush at the end of his doomed presidency, after the catastrophic collapse of the economy and the bloody disaster of the Iraq war.

A bumper crop of pre-inauguration polls tell the story of how deeply unpopular the 45th president is already. His personal popularity is as low as 32% compared to 61% favorability for President Obama.

Approval of his transition shows him trailing Obama by an even greater margin: just 40% like the way Trump has performed since November, compared to 84% for Obama’s transition eight years ago. Even George W Bush, elected after the extraordinary recount and legal coup in 2000, earned a 61% rating for his transition.

These aren’t trivial numbers. They are the white blood cells of the circulatory system that flows through Washington. Good poll numbers can inoculate a president when Congress opposes him. Bad numbers reveal a president vulnerable to outside attacks and embolden his many rivals both inside and outside his own party.

Those numbers are about to get a lot worse. In his first year in office, Obama lost more than 15 points on his job approval. If Trump follows the same track, he will be polling in the mid-20s by this time next year. To put that into context, Richard Nixon’s job approval on the day he quit the Oval Office was 24%.

And no Mr President, these aren’t rigged polls.

The polls just reflect what people think of you, and they all rate you poorly both on a personal and professional basis. Here’s what’s rigged: an election you can win after losing the popular vote by more than 2 points, as the polls correctly forecast.

What could drive Trump’s poll numbers so low? Unlike Obama, who inherited the worst economy in two generations, the incoming president cannot blame external forces. The greatest threat, both to his presidency and the republic, comes from Trump himself.

Somewhere near the top of the list is potential profiteering from the presidency through his continued ownership of the Trump Organization. It seems Trump will be in breach of the government lease on his new Washington hotel as soon as he is sworn into office today. His efforts to hold onto the lease – which specifically prohibits government officials from holding it – will reveal his true priorities in office.

According to his personal attorney, Trump has drawn an ethical line by appointing his own ethics officer inside his own company. This is a quaint arrangement favored by foxes guarding henhouses. The ethics of the Trump Organization are irrelevant; the ethics of the presidency, however, are governed by article one of the constitution, which prohibits gifts of any kind from foreign powers.

Even under his own sham scheme, the new president has already breached his so-called ethical standards. “President-elect Trump first ordered that all pending deals be terminated,” Trump’s attorney Sheri Dillon told the press last week. “The trust agreement as directed by President Trump imposes severe restrictions on new deals. No new foreign deals will be made whatsoever during the duration of President Trump’s presidency.”

This will come as news to the good people of Aberdeen who are about to witness the dramatic expansion of the Trump golf course in Scotland. That expansion, confirmed just this week, involves another 18 holes, a new 450-room hotel, a timeshare complex and a private housing estate.

Trump’s staff brush aside these niceties by saying the Scottish deal is just a wafer-thin mint of an expansion of an existing deal.

Sadly the constitution doesn’t distinguish between new and existing deals when it strictly prohibits the president from drawing any benefits from foreign powers. It just says they are all unconstitutional.

What kind of deals might breach the now famous emoluments clause? As ProPublica has detailed, there’s the Indian deal in Mumbai that involves the vice-president of the ruling BJP party, who is also an elected official. There’s a deal in Bali, Indonesia, with an Indonesian politician, who has partnered with state-owned companies from China and South Korea. And there’s a deal in Manila with a man recently named as an economic envoy to the US by the murderous President Duterte of the Philippines.

You don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to appreciate the legal and political jeopardy for Trump. President Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about sex, a supposedly high crime and misdemeanor that is not actually cited by the constitution. Unlike making money from foreign officials, which is.

Finally there’s the noose that’s tightening around Trump’s alleged Russian relationships. You know, the ones the new president said IN ALL CAPS absolutely don’t exist and never have, not ever, oh no.

The FBI and five other agencies are now investigating whether Russia covertly transferred cash to pay email hackers in the United States as part of a broader Kremlin plot to influence the presidential campaign in Trump’s favor.

We also know that counter-intelligence officials are investigating possible contacts and ties between Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and Russian officials.

Almost every scandal gets compared to Watergate, but very few genuinely deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. Of course, Watergate wasn’t potentially financed by our mortal enemies in Moscow, even if it did involve undermining a presidential election.

The last covert plot between a president’s inner circle and an enemy state was Reagan’s illegal gun-running operation to Iran. Perhaps that’s what Trump means by stealing Reagan’s slogan about making America great again.

Now that he’s the 45th President of the United States, the rules of this game have officially changed. Donald Trump cannot trash tweet his way out his problems any more. The constitution does not provide for that particular escape pod from Air Force One.

The TV star is now the desperately flawed lead in a tragicomedy, the author of his own misfortunes. If our bodies are our gardens, this president has unnaturally orange thumbs.