As the sand runs out of the quadrennial hourglass, and the administration of our nation’s foremost very stable genius prepares to drunkenly lie down in a snow bank and go to sleep forever, it seems a natural time to pause for reflection on the many lessons that he has taught us.

Donald Trump’s presidency has truly shown that more than anything, America is a nation of laws.

It must surprise you that I am suggesting this. That is because you sense about me that you be would annoyed about how much I disliked him if you didn’t dislike him also. People around my age who wear medium-fashionable eyeglasses have predictable political views, and those views are never that the 45th president is paragon of lawfulness and virtue.

You can relax and rest assured that, predictably, I am asserting no such thing. I am not proposing that Donald Trump himself has been respecting the law, but rather that the fact of his presidency demonstrates how much we respect it. This is because any country that would allow him to become and act as our president must be full of people who respect the law so deeply that they would all be forced to agree with one another that he had technically fulfilled the legal requirements to do so, and that we therefore had to let him. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to, and we have since produced hundreds of overlapping theories as to why he did; and yet it was impossible to show that he hadn’t. Only in a country that truly loved following the law could such a thing happen, despite it going so definitively against everyone’s better judgement.

Let’s cast our minds back to 2015 when this all started. And remember how preposterous the idea initially seemed that someone that narcissistic and oafish would ever be allowed to hold power. How completely obvious to everyone across the width and breadth of the political spectrum, and indeed all of American society, that he lacked the wherewithal and emotional maturity to manage an after-work softball team, much less the apparatus of the executive branch. To get to a place where he ended up actually ended up executing the office of president of the United States required a lot of people following a lot of laws.

As the whole dreadful process wound its way through our history, from the first clerk in a state election office building squinting at a submitted form that someone had really written “Donald J. Trump” on, to the person shrugging and turning on the machine that prints lawn signs, to the Secret Service lady driving one of those decoy SUVs in the motorcade on the way to the inauguration, some part of everyone involved was thinking– we all know that this is a joke person and we shouldn’t be allowing this but there are laws and we’ve all got to follow them no matter how weird the result of doing that is.

Even now, in the junky caboose of this Snowpiercer-esque presidency, people have had to dress up and go to work in courthouses to rifle through legal briefs full of misspellings and dream logic about voter fraud and pretend to take their arguments seriously. As we do these things, a part of us knows how ridiculous it all is, and yet we must, because the law compels us. We are Americans, and if there is one thing that we love more than anything, it is laws, and the following of those laws.

Back in those waning days of 2016, as we grappled with how following our laws about democracy had forced us to acknowledge that the person who had gotten fewer votes in the election had ‘won’ in a odd, technical, but extremely legal manner, many assumed that doing all this had probably gone against his own better judgement as well. That he’d just been doing it for attention but that the whole thing had gotten out of hand and he wasn’t really expecting to win, just shout a lot and rile people up and then get to have some TV show or something. As we prepared ourselves for what we accurately assumed would be a four-year psychological assault, somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, he was no doubt dimly aware that his irrepressible zest for scamming his way through life was about to collide with a governmental power to do so, inevitably leading towards some kind of downfall. He might have even imagined a future time when he was on the verge of becoming powerless, with about 51% of the country calling for him to be drawn and quartered, with dozens of crimes waiting to spring out and yell “surprise!” when Joe Biden walks through the door on January 20th and turns on the lights.

And the reason that he was dreading that day? Because he knew how much we love following the law.