This Wednesday, we will hit a political milestone which is rather grim for me to contemplate (please read this as a trigger warning: this is going to be a very dismal column, so please stop reading now if you aren't in the mood for that sort of thing). On May 20th, Donald Trump will have been in office for exactly one-third of his second term. It will mark 16 months from when he was sworn in -- but the grim part is that this means we've still got twice as long as what we've all just been through before his term will finally be over. When you consider what has already happened so far, contemplating another 32 months of it is downright frightening.

With Trump, the only constant is that no matter how many times you think to yourself: "Well, he's hit rock bottom -- surely he couldn't do anything worse than this!" the hard reality is that he always manages to outdo himself -- often within the same week.

Trump's second term has had virtually no guardrails to it at all. There aren't any adults in the room left to tell Trump: "No." Trump does whatever he feels like doing, the Republicans in Congress are so terrified of his wrath that they don't push back on any of it, and the courts take an interminable time to place any checks on Trump's increasingly authoritarian impulses (checks which often later get overturned by the rightwing radicals on the Supreme Court).

Right now, Trump is at a low point. Politically, he's in worse shape than he ever has been, according to multiple polls. The American public disapproves of the job he is doing by a proportion that is close to (or beyond) 2-to-1. That's historically bad. Trump started a war of choice by ignoring all the concerns from the military and intelligence advisors (those who remain who are not complete toadies, that is), and now he has no idea what to do about the disastrous way it all turned out. He's now reportedly "bored" by this war. But unlike some previous ill-advised foreign wars America has fought, this one has directly and acutely brought economic pain to the American public. Which is what is causing Trump's poll numbers to collapse.

The only good thing you can say about Trump's war of choice with Iran is that it seems destined to turn out as an excellent bad example. In future, historians will doubtlessly point to it and say: "This is precisely how not to go to war." Trump didn't bother explaining the war's goals and/or trying to rally support from the American public beforehand (or since). He also refused to consult with (or even warn) our allies beforehand (except Israel, although it seems more accurate to say that they consulted us). He completely ignored any possibility that anything could go wrong, and discounted the sage advice that Iran did indeed have an easy way to hamstring the entire world's economy, and that they would indeed use it.

Trump is now caught in a trap of his own making. He desperately wants Iran to just roll over and give up (he keeps telling them to cry "Uncle!"), but that is just not going to happen. Trump knows that if he strikes a deal that essentially replicates the deal Obama had struck with them (on the nuclear issue) then he's going to look pretty foolish. And because he has such maximalist demands for Iran, it seems less and less likely that a short-term solution can be found that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's ports while the two sides negotiate over a longer-term deal.

This leaves not only Trump but the rest of the world stuck in a stalemate, with the price of oil and other vital raw materials sky-high and other vital supply chains either at serious risk or completely shut down. America has been diminished on the world stage by Trump, and the longer this all goes on, the weaker we are going to look.

Domestically, Trump's firehose of corruption and abuse continues apace. So many things happen so quickly that it becomes impossible to keep up with the latest outrages. This is by design. Today came the news that Trump is going to take $1.7 billion of taxpayer money and set up a fund so he can dole it out to the insurrectionists who viciously and violently attacked the police protecting American democracy on January 6th. This seems to be a trifecta of corruption, since it could accurately be classified as "waste, fraud, and abuse" (rather than just one of them). By week's end, however, this will likely be largely forgotten by most people. We'll all have moved on to fresher and more recent abuses of power by then.

And we've got 32 more months of this firehose to live through.

Democrats are hopeful that Trump's sinking poll numbers will doom his fellow Republicans in the midterm elections in November. This is likely true, but you've got to also remember that we've got over five months before people even get a chance to vote. That's a lot of time, and it means nobody has any clue what people will be talking about by the end of the summer. Maybe we'll have invaded Greenland by then? It wouldn't surprise me, at this point.

Or maybe we won't even have free and fair elections. As the elections get closer, Trump and his henchmen are probably going to get more and more worried about losing control of Congress, and they have all sorts of ways they could interfere -- both before and after Election Day. The fact that all of these things should be (and used to be) considered "unthinkable" in America is certainly not going to be any sort of constraint. Trump could declare some bogus, made-up "national emergency" before the elections, and with that power he could do anything he felt like doing. He could send troops to man the polling stations in inner cities. He could seize all the ballots as they come in. Even if the voting goes off freely and without a hitch, both Trump and his minions in Congress could just refuse to accept any results that showed Democrats had won. They could refuse to seat all the newly-elected Democrats and declare that they were still in control.

This is all pretty dystopian to even contemplate, but at this point there simply is nothing that can be discounted as completely "unthinkable" when it comes to Trump. Which is a terrifying thought indeed.

Even if things don't get that bad, would anything truly change if Democrats did win big? That's another uncomfortable thought to have. Let's say a blue wave does emerge and the Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress. Let's say Trump does not somehow try to overturn this result (which is a fairly large thing to assume). The Democrats would then take control next January.

But what would happen in the meantime? We might have the busiest lame-duck Congress of all time, between the election and the start of the new year. The Republicans in Congress, knowing they were about to become powerless, might just hustle through the most radical legislation America has ever seen. They could formally hand over all sorts of power to Trump, giving him their imprimatur to essentially ignore Congress from that point on. Sweeping executive powers could be created at the drop of a hat. The Republican Senate would either jettison the filibuster or somehow ignore their own rules to jam such legislation through. Trump, of course, would gleefully sign all of it.

When Democrats do finally take control in this scenario, what would really change? Anything? Trump will still probably continue to do whatever he feels like, either spending money as he sees fit or withholding funding for things he doesn't like. The Supreme Court will likely allow him to get away with most of it, under their "unitary executive" theory of American authoritarianism.

Democrats could spend their time passing all sort of bills, but each and every one of them would likely be vetoed by Trump, and it would almost certainly be impossible to override any of these vetoes. Democrats could try to force Trump to do things (or not do things) with their annual budget bills, but Trump could just shrug his shoulders and dare Democrats to shut the whole government down. If this happens, Trump will declare some more emergency powers and do what he feels like without having to listen to (or bargain with) Democrats at all.

"But the Democrats could investigate Trump and hold hearings!" you may be thinking. This is true, but only as far as it goes. What is going to stop Trump -- or any of his cabinet members -- from just ignoring congressional subpoenas? Or maybe they'd show up for the hearings and instead of answering questions instead just use their time to rant and rave at Democrats (because they know how much Trump likes to watch that sort of thing on television). And every single thing Congress tried to do in any sort of investigation over anything Trump or his henchmen has done would immediately be appealed. Trump, after all, is an absolute master at using the justice system to run out the clock. And the new Democratic Congress would only have two short years before another election intervened. Trump could easily cause enough delays to push out any serious investigation by Congress far beyond his term in office.

What would Congress do in response? Well, there's not a whole lot they could do. They could refer people who ignored subpoenas to the Justice Department for prosecution... and I will just pause here, for everyone to have a big belly laugh over any possibility of anyone actually being prosecuted by Trump's attorney general for such lawbreaking. Trump might even start issuing pre-emptive pardons for anyone called to testify, so they could just laugh at congressional subpoenas when they get them.

With Congress completely sidelined, Trump would be free to run the country however he liked. What could possibly stop him at that point? He won't ever have to get elected again, so public opinion would be meaningless to him. He would be mostly concerned with imposing his tacky legacy on the country, which might mean Trump ordering his own face be carved into Mount Rushmore (and other equally dictatorial, cult-of-personality whims). Maybe he'll just tear down the Washington Monument and start building the Trump Monument in its place? I wouldn't put it past him, after seeing what he has done and is doing to the White House and the Kennedy Center.

Perhaps I am being alarmist. Perhaps the worst of all these things will never come to pass. Perhaps it's just me being gloomy and pessimistic on a Monday. After all, Trump is indeed at the weakest point politically that he ever has been. As more time goes by, the outrage over the dismal state of the economy and inflation continues to shrink Trump's support, as even his own MAGA followers still have to fill their cars and trucks up at the gas station. This is the main reason why he's losing support among them -- why his poll numbers have gotten so bad recently.

Perhaps this will spur Republicans in Congress to try and distance themselves from Trump, heading into the midterms? That's a pretty remote possibility, since Trump still does exercise iron-fisted control over his party's base. In GOP primary after GOP primary, Trump has been telling his voters which candidate to vote for and they have mostly been following his orders. Voters in Indiana threw out most of the Republicans who refused to let Trump redistrict the state before the midterms. Senator Bill Cassidy didn't even make the runoff in Louisiana this weekend (which is incredibly rare -- a sitting senator being taken down in such a fashion). Tomorrow, Representative Thomas Massie may also get ousted by his district's voters because he dares to challenge Trump. Trump's retribution is still a very powerful thing, among Republican voters.

It's really impossible to predict how any of this is going to turn out. With Trump, it's impossible to predict what's going to happen next week, much less in early November or beyond. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that it will all be exhausting to experience, on a daily basis.

And we've got a whole lot more of those days still left to go. We've only made it through one-third of Trump's second term in office. Sixteen months down, thirty-two to go.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant