The end is coming. You can feel it. I can feel it. While this White House has been a den of absurdity from the start, the legal pressure is ratcheting up, and the current nonsense on display portends to an ugly demise of this presidency. Robert Mueller’s final report is thought to be coming in the late winter or early spring. The White House has added 17 new lawyers to prepare for the congressional oversight that is nearing for this administration and for whatever is looming in the report.

Earlier this year I thought it was possible that the report could very well show nothing linking the president to suspected crimes during the 2016 campaign. Mueller has had a stellar reputation during his career, and if he didn’t find anything, then that’s the way it would be. However, the drips of information over the last few months, which have been major, make it clear that good news is not on the way for the president. And more bombshells are likely coming. The final verdict and the fallout are going to be highlights in the history books my child studies years from now.

In the meantime, we’ve got a ridiculous partial government shutdown where the president is proving how lousy he is at being a deal maker. He’s not getting the wall he so desperately craves, but he is determined to destroy everything in an attempt to force it into being. He has no leverage and the majority of the country is not on his side with any of this. Once again, he has created a crisis (long government shutdown) out of a manufactured crisis (demanding a border wall to keep his shrinking base happy). It’s a spectacular display of recklessness, but it’s about the only thing that keeps — for now — the headlines off whatever is coming from the special counsel investigation. We’re seeing the angry defiance of a president whose reality show is lurching toward cancellation. He feels it too.