Donald Trump. Axel Schmidt/Reuters We are just six months into Donald Trump's term as president.

But the rapid pace of news—and the extent to which those events are quickly metabolized by the public—has made it feel like an eternity.

Each week brings new revelations of misconduct and transgressive behavior, from Trump's breathless attacks on the press to his open contempt for the independence of federal law enforcement.

And if it's not Trump's individual behavior that drives headlines, it's the actions of his administration and its allies in Congress, from the "Muslim ban" to the full-on effort to gut Medicaid and unravel what's left of the federal social safety net.

The sheer volume of controversy feels unsustainable, and it's hard not to be gripped by the sense that this is the nadir of Trump administration; that it can't get worse.

But it can. It likely will.

Consider the last Republican presidency. Between the Iraq war, torture, and the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush's critics remember him as one of the worst presidents of America's post–World War II era, a woefully ill-prepared and ill-informed figure who left the nation and the world worse than how he found it. Memory being what it is, it's easy to remember Bush as being terrible from the beginning, that the dark course of his administration was evident from the moment he entered office.

This isn't true. For most of his first year, until the attacks on Sept. 11, Bush was an unremarkable, even mediocre, president. His was a typical Republican administration, with an interest in tax cuts, deregulation, and conservative social policy, with occasional bipartisan cooperation from a Senate Democratic majority. George W. Bush. Joshua Roberts/Reuters The milestones of Bush's administration—the events and choices that form the bulk of his legacy—wouldn't happen for at least two years after his inauguration. From the perspective of July 2001, it was far from obvious that Americans were facing an era of profound political turbulence, and even less obvious that this would be the function of an empowered executive branch, flexing its muscle at every opportunity.