Knowing what we know now does not justify a full pardon for Bush 43, but he did enough to earn an early parole at the very least. What critics may say at any point in time is of no consequence to History, which remembers little of those who angrily questioned Eisenhower in Hungary, Kennedy in Cuba, Johnson in Czechoslovakia, Nixon in Cambodia, Carter in Afghanistan and Reagan in Lebanon. The Cold War might have turned out differently if any U.S. president had done what he was criticized for not doing, but who can say that the difference would not have been for the worse?

History likes to take its time, and its verdict comes slowly and erratically. Knowing what will be said of Obama’s determination to “change the playbook” remains unknown. Meantime, the tragedy is that the case against each president is first adjudicated by his successor, seemingly acting as his historical executor—Eisenhower for Truman, Kennedy for Eisenhower, or Carter for Nixon—just as, now, Trump does for Obama. But no such verdict is ever final. History relies on its own code of justice: it must clean the rot inevitably left behind before it can tell, and even then, it is rarely pour toujours.

Where does the Trump moment fit in all that? Looking back on one of his most difficult decisions as president, Eisenhower reflected on the words of Vannevar Bush: “Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; and it can be managed by reason and evaluation.” As different as Obama was from Eisenhower fifty years earlier, these are words he lived by when, late in his presidency, he cited his decision to not intervene in Syria as his own “liberating” moment. Can Trump, too, have a liberating moment—from himself, no less than from others? And where and how: for doing more in Afghanistan and Ukraine, maybe, or for greater aggressiveness in North Korea and Iran, or confronting Russia and China, or wherever his impulses take him in these and other instances? The cannons of tweeted rhetoric he fires ad nauseam are deafening, embarrassing and worse—but these are often blanks that fail to explode, and the simple truth is that no one yet knows for sure how far his moment will extend and with what consequences, however much fears may spread on both accounts.

Hold some of your fire, then: “things past” are not past yet, and “things future” have not been told yet. History is reluctant to share its plans. At its best, it remembers the present, though retroactively. At its worst, it imagines the past, though creatively. Throwing the dice and pretending to know the way ahead is risky.

MEANTIME, THERE is “the present of things present,” which oddly begins in the past tense. On the eve of Obama’s election, Zbigniew Brzezinski asked: How has America led since the Cold War? “In a word, badly,” he responded, expounding on his answer at book length. Obama’s eight-year presidency did not change this verdict, notwithstanding the enthusiasm, both at home and especially abroad, that greeted his election. If anything, the “Zbig question” has gained in intensity. Trump has been wasting America’s reputation, which Obama had restored somewhat from the new lows of his predecessor. Indeed, he may be the first U.S. president ever who does not know, or measure, what he says, and does not fully understand what he does. A mere one hundred days into the Trump moment, a Pew survey of thirty-seven countries revealed an image of the president as “arrogant” (75 percent), “intolerant” (65 percent), “unqualified” (74 percent) and “dangerous” (62 percent), resulting in an overall 42 percent decrease in confidence in the U.S. president.

That alone, however, does not mean that what the president does or aims at is wrong, or that what he or his advisers say is meaningless. Over eight years, Obama reminded us that a seductive and competent president does not necessarily produce a successful presidency. Now, his opposite proposes to engage Russia, challenge China, contain Iran, defeat the Islamic State, defang North Korea, reset bad wars that went worse, deny the reported “unfixability” of the Middle East, ask allies for more defense spending, outsource conflicts to no-name viceroys, negotiate better trade deals, balance the reality of climate change with the realities of economic growth, and more; indeed, to put America first—to stand up, speak out and move on distinctively from the past president who was said to have stood down, gone low and moved backward.

In short, keep America up, the allies in their place and the enemies out of place, so that the world can be made safe “like never before.” Well, why not? On every issue, there is room for a serious policy debate; restraint, too, responds to laws of diminishing returns. This is nobody’s exclusive agenda, and each question has been, is, or will be everybody’s problem and responsibility.

Beyond the president’s political and moral failures, the Trump moment will take a bit longer to be adjudicated over the same security agenda that awaited Hillary Clinton or might be inherited by Vice President Mike Pence. There are global issues of great-power relations, including Russia and China (don’t provoke, but don’t indulge); there are postsecular struggles to wage on terrorism (deter, preempt, destroy and coopt); there are ongoing wars to end, even if or because they cannot be won (in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Syria); there are regional conflicts with nuclear overtones (in North Korea and with Iran); there are the perennials of history (like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or in Ukraine and some other parts of eastern Europe and Northeast Asia); there are a third nuclear age to master, flows of refugees to redirect, tons of global debt to carry, an environment to protect, a cybernetic space to regulate, trade deals to update—first things first, but so many pressing matters that everything appears to need to come first.

For the most part, these are all issues that cannot afford a time out for the rest of the decade. As Henry Kissinger wrote in his most recent book, “It must not be assumed that, left unattended, these trends will at some point reconcile automatically to a world of balance and cooperation—or even any order at all.” This is a moment, possibly an era, of permanent crisis, moral uncertainty, geopolitical mutation and global disorder—a time when History is about to test Isaiah Berlin’s dying conviction that “the twenty-first century . . . can be only a better time for mankind than my terrible century has been.”

No presidential transition is the same, but all must proceed in full awareness of the one that came before. Most U.S. presidents have claimed such an awareness of the past. In most cases, their claim exceeded the history they knew (like Truman) or understood (like Carter). In others, it reflected their experience (like Eisenhower and Bush 41), curiosity (like Clinton), or values (like Reagan or even Carter). Few presidents fully understood the history they knew from the start, like, say, Nixon and Bush 41; and even fewer were able to learn and absorb what they did not know well initially, like, say, Obama.

Trump, however, stands like no other president before him. He maintains a distant relationship with facts, which he replaces with what he himself has called “truthful hyperbole,” and “an innocent form of exaggeration.” He has little time for history, which requires a curiosity he lacks. He is not much of a strategic thinker, which would require a consistency that does not fit his impulsive temperament. He is neither an interventionist like Kennedy, nor an abstentionist like Carter, and neither a multilateralist like Obama, nor a unilateralist like Bush. Call him a bilateralist, meaning a transactional one-on-one leader—one deal per issue, and one issue per deal.

That being the case, can the moment nevertheless reveal Trump as the ahistorical and instinctive deal maker he claimed to be while campaigning? To fear that time is running out on the Trump moment is also to fear that time is running out on us all. During the Cold War, Americans, who had been initially indifferent to the growing war in Vietnam, rallied to end it when it became morally and politically unacceptable. The same can be said of the war in Iraq in the 2000s, which they had initially supported, but abandoned when it turned into a strategic failure—no less than a moral one. In each case, it was late, but not too late: next, Americans elected presidents, Reagan and Obama, who made many of them feel good about themselves, and much of the world think well or better of America. Now, we have a president who feels exceedingly good about himself, while the world thinks increasingly badly of him. How that turns out will play itself out for a bit more time, as History, somewhat puzzled and even offended, reveals whether so much of Trump will become embedded in America as to make his moment into an era.