Donald Trump isn’t going to be president forever, much as he would like to declare himself immortal. At some point, his unpopularity will catch up with him. It may be in the next midterms, as Democrats are increasingly dreaming about recapturing both houses of Congress. It could be in the run-up to the 2028 election, when Trump will have to contend with his lame duck status, even if he tries to run again as an 82-year-old.

But the odds are, at some point, Democrats will be calling the shots. The question is, what are the shots going to look like?

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The country has never seen this much destruction of its institutions in modern times. Normally, when the government switches hands between parties, it’s a question of rolling back policies. But nothing is normal with Trump. In less than a year, he and his hacks have devastated the government, firing thousands of nonpartisan federal workers, politicizing science beyond all recognition, and forcing world-renowned experts to leave the government because they were deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump. He has turned the Department of Justice into a carousel of retribution, saved only by the sheer incompetence of those willing to carry out his orders.

And that’s just the government. Trump has ruined America’s reputation abroad. The word of the U.S. leader is now synonymous with whims, egotism, and xenophobia. Would-be Americans who have gone through all the proper channels for citizenship are kidnapped by ICE in courthouses, even as they are following the law.

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Meantime, Trump has been using the office to enrich himself and his family. It’s not even happening secretly. Help the Trump family financially, and you could be pardoned. Even when he’s not benefiting directly, Trump extorts money from universities for, among other reasons, having protections for trans students.

How do you restore institutions and society as a whole after so much destruction and corruption?

Rebuilding government agencies like the CDC is expected to take a generation, as will restoring the cutting-edge research that was tossed out by Trump. That’s just getting things back to where they were – if that’s even possible.

The bigger question is what can be done to strengthen institutions so that they can’t bend as easily toward authoritarianism. Unfortunately, that is a huge undertaking, and in a closely divided country, an enormously difficult one.

Some scholars have suggested that we need to have a new form of Reconstruction, which rebuilt America after the Civil War. The problem with the analogy is that it took a war to defeat the South. Electoral defeat is not the same at all, particularly if Republicans have a chance to reclaim government again. (Also, Reconstruction wasn’t a roaring success, eventually giving way to the Jim Crow era.)

The real question is, how willing are Democrats to hold the people in the Trump administration accountable for their actions? Consider Pete Hegseth, who reportedly ordered the murder of survivors of attacks on boats supposedly carrying drugs. By any account, that is a war crime. Or Border Patrol chief Tom Homan, who was being investigated for a $50,000 bribe before Trump’s Justice Department shut his case down. Or Homan’s underlings committing due process and human rights violations.

Are Democrats willing to push for criminal charges against the egregious lawbreaking that characterizes the administration? With their present leadership, it’s hard to imagine that they would have the stomach for it. But the fact that Trump was never held accountable for the January 6 insurrection (thanks to cowardly Senate Republicans) paved the way for even worse actions. If there are no consequences, there is no reason to stop the crimes if given the opportunity in the future.

With so much going on daily, it’s hard to take the long view. Yet it’s clear that future elections are going to be about so much more than policy. It’s about what democracy looks like post-Trump – and whether there will be a democracy at all.

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