The cumulative effect of such rhetoric has been to simply create the perception of a “Schrödinger’s presidency” that permanently exists in a simultaneous state of life and death. At any given moment, you can visit the nation’s leading news outlets and receive a terminal diagnosis of the president’s career, only to come back months later and read that the delay of the imminent end just proves it’s now more imminent than ever.

Of 45 presidents, only one has resigned, and none have been successfully impeached. All have faced periodic scandals and bad headlines that have, at times, clouded their ability to effectively govern. Yet Trump remains unique in just how casually and constantly his presidency is framed as bridging the conventional world of political scandal with historically exceptional outcomes. Predictions of an explicit downfall and unfinished term, once the justified taboos of presidential analysis, are now the standard language of Trump observers.

By any journalistic standard, this is deeply undisciplined and reckless. The vulture-circling that defined media coverage of Trump’s first year reveal a consistent bias toward imagining the most sensationalistic outcomes to even the vaguest developments on the scandal front. Weak or ambiguous evidence is inflated into sweeping conclusions through the use of cartoonish generalizations about characters and events that are only half understood.