Following the Brexit referendum and Prime Minister David Cameron’s abrupt resignation, the British columnist Polly Toynbee wrote, “Leaders don’t fall like kings in a Shakespearean bloodbath, but our democracy executes them pretty brutally nonetheless, with midnight removal vans instead of tumbrels.”

Here in America, the opposite is generally true. Presidents aren’t hooded and hauled away at the whim of events; they usually serve out their terms no matter what might transpire in the meantime. A president vanishing into the night as Cameron did would be regarded as a national trauma—such is the pomp and circumstance that we’ve scaffolded around the Oval Office. We Americans love to have it both ways: we treat the presidency both as a democratic institution accountable to the people and a head of state that sometimes borders on a king.

It’s that latter monarchical impulse that’s on display whenever presidents enter office and also whenever they leave. Today, Donald Trump’s departure saw this majesty overlaid with the usual Trumpian camp, “Hail to the Chief” sandwiched between Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” and the Village People’s “YMCA.” Trump began his term testily contesting reports of the crowd size at his inauguration; he ended it to cheers from a modest group of supporters in red hats. He entered amid sighs of relief that the transfer of power had been smooth even after such a jarring election; he departed a capital city under military occupation. He bade what sounded like a final goodbye to his supporters; he also promised, like some political Optimus Prime, that “we will be back in some form.”

Trump has been as paradoxical as the office he’s inhabited. He was hardly a game-changer in terms of policy: he didn’t bring the troops home, he didn’t bring China to heel, he didn’t downsize the deep state or rebuild America’s industrial base or engender some kind of Christian revival or even pardon Edward Snowden. His final act in office was to revoke the executive order banning White House staffers from becoming lobbyists, about as swampy a thing as he might have done. Even his biggest accomplishment, economic stability after years of failed jump-starts under Barack Obama, has since been eclipsed by the coronavirus and the lockdowns.

Yet even as nothing has changed, it feels as though everything has, like we’ve aged decades under this man. Trump’s napalming of norms, his egotism and lies that culminated in the insurrection at the Capitol, are not problems neatly contained to a single four-year span. Yet neither is the malfeasance and failure of the political class that he’s often correctly criticized. In this way, both by being right and by being so very wrong, Trump has exposed a deep rot within our politics. It may be that his greatest legacy is to shatter some of our innocence, to make us just a little more agnostic about our civic religion than we were before.

The conservative movement has changed too, growing meaner and coarser, while also better attuning itself to the problems of empire and decline. We don’t yet know where it will go from here; we don’t even know what Trump’s next move will be. All we can be sure of is that, to borrow one of Henry Adams’ mischievous epithets about the presidency, our latest democratic potentate has gone. Enter the next.