One of the things that has bothered me the most about Donald Trump in the past two years, since he famously descended the escalator in Trump Tower’s gilded lobby (with paid actors there to cheer for him), has been his ultimate ability to—for lack of a more elegant phrase—simply get away with it. And by it, I mean virtually everything. Trump has spent his life lying without repercussion about the number of floors in his buildings; the size of his crowds; whether he owns a real Renoir; the veracity of the Billy Bush tape; the contents of the tax bill; and the impact of climate change, among many other things. His explosive divorces have ended in remarriages; his numerous bankruptcies do not appear to have stymied his lifestyle; this, after all, is the guy who was elected president after losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.

In this mortality tale, I feared, Trump might not ever be faced with the sort of chilling epiphany countenanced by men such as Roger Ailes and Joe Paterno, or Bernie Madoff and Bill Cosby, whose past demons returned to tread on them. We now live in a world where truth is increasingly obfuscated, or distorted by our filter bubbles and feedback loops. And this, more than any other, is the land that Trump presides over. According to this logic, the president seemed like he’d be able to forever avoid accountability for allegedly assaulting women, making fun of people with disabilities, enticing violence around the globe, and leaving a stain on the most important office in the land. It seemed that karma may never actually come close to him.

Lately, however, I’ve come to realize that while Trump probably won’t go down in traditional forms of ignominy, he might face a worse fate. And that destiny is already beginning to take its course. Trump, it seems, is at the very beginning of becoming irrelevant. Sure, he's still the most-talked about person on Earth, but it is ebbing. There have even been moments when Trump’s name wasn’t on the front page of The New York Times. (Lord knows, to his consternation, he was not Time’s person of the year.) And while there was a point in time when the most widely read, e-mailed, and shared stories at news outlets around the Web were almost all Trump-related, they are increasingly about other topics, like Potato Latke recipes and why your grumpy teenager doesn’t want to talk to you. If you look right now on Twitter, he’s curiously not among the global-trending topics. (Though he could be tomorrow.) Part of that is because Trump’s eccentric behavior is becoming normalized. But it’s also because we’re learning to tune him out.

I know that by writing this column, I’m contributing to the problem. By reading it, you are, too. But that’s O.K., because this particular story has a happy ending. Or at least, it will one day. I don’t believe the Russia investigation will make its way to Trump. I doubt very much that Trump will be impeached for obstruction of justice, treason, or because his aides (and possibly even relatives) have ties to the Kremlin. But there’s a pattern I’ve started to see in his narcissism that is more likely to undercut him. And it won’t simply befall him. It might even deal a considerable blow to the companies—like Twitter and Facebook; the Daily Mail, InfoWars, and Fox News—who have taken advantage of his attention-seeking for their own gain. And that, as the folks in Silicon Valley like to say, truly will make the world a better place.