Whatever the turning point, thinking about Trump as a lame-duck president seems a better rubric for making sense of his administration than most. Consider the things that happen in a lame-duck period.

A lame-duck president’s legislative agenda starts to stall out. Members of Congress are just no longer interested in following the president’s lead, especially where it might create a political liability for them. Big bills start to waste away on Capitol Hill, and where a new president would bring both political capital and novelty to bear, a lame duck just doesn’t have the juice. So it is with Trump. His various attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare have all failed, and while he was able to force both houses of Congress to take them back up before, largely through sheer force of will, his more recent pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he has no interest in heading into the breach once again, and GOP members have largely agreed with him.

A lame-duck president gets caught in a vicious cycle. Once legislators start refusing to follow his lead, he begins to look like a paper tiger, so they follow his lead even less. Now that Republican senators have defied Trump once, why should they get in line on other controversial bills, like tax reform?

By the time a president reaches his lame-duck period, scandals have begun to pile up. Sometimes they are minor and varied; sometimes they’re blockbusters, from Iran-Contra to Monica Lewinsky. Either way, the taint of controversy tarnishes the president, diminishes his political capital, and starts to absorb time and energy that once would have been spent on constructive rather than defensive actions. Trump is already facing an open-ended investigation, unmatched in breadth by anything except the Clinton-era Whitewater scandal—taking in allegations of money-laundering, of espionage, and of violations of campaign-finance laws, and potentially reaching into Trump’s own personal financial dealings prior to becoming president. It’s already proving a large distraction, as demonstrated by Trump taking time while returning from a trip to Europe to dictate a statement on behalf of his son, Donald Trump Jr. The statement he dictated turned out to be an obfuscatory disaster that only made the matter worse. Meanwhile, Trump’s personal lawyer is busy sending defenses of Trump’s Charlottesville comments to conservative journalists.

As controversy and inaction set in during a president’s lame-duck period, he starts to lose staffers who see no reason to stick around for a final stretch of inaction. Others stick around but grumble to the press about lack of discipline and lack of progress—and as they look ahead to their next job, they often put preserving their own reputations ahead of advancing their boss’s agenda. Trump’s West Wing has a busy revolving door—he’s already lost two communications directors, one press secretary, one chief of staff, and a national-security adviser, among others—and the tenor of leaks about the White House, once largely a chronicle of internecine warfare, is increasingly full of statements of disappointment and frustration about the president himself.