IT’S only been two years, but somehow he seems to have been around much longer. That’s the thing about Donald Trump – such is the rapid fire, perpetual motion of the US president and his controversies that they blur one into another creating a normalcy out of the abnormal.

Think back to some of those controversial moments and many seem like ages ago when in fact they were all but yesterday.

For example it was only in January this year that he dismissed vast swathes of the planet as “shithole countries”.

Again it was only in March and April when he fired his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, by Twitter and denied knowledge of hush payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

It was only last summer too at that now infamous Helsinki summit, pictured, below, that he sided with Russian president Vladimir Putin against the findings of his own US intelligence agencies that Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

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“President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Trump told a press conference.

Unrelenting as ever, the second half of 2018 was to bring yet more Trump mayhem, unpredictability and incompetence.

In November, visiting the scene of the deadliest wildfires in Northern California history, he mistakenly called the devastated town of Paradise, “Pleasure” during a live television interview.

By year’s end he had shut down the US federal government for the third time, on this occasion over his demand for money to build a border wall with Mexico.

And to top it all off in the spirit of Christmas he asked a seven-year-old girl: “Are you still a believer in Santa? At seven, it’s marginal, right?”

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Throughout 2018, just as in the year before, Donald Trump has hogged the world’s headlines. In that time he has divided America and dominated world affairs to a degree that has no modern precedent.

“My whole life has been heat. I like heat, in a certain way,” Trump said in January summing up the sensory overload of his presidency.

This past year he’s created plenty of heat and most observers believe it will become furnace-like as the year turns and Trump finds himself at war on multiple fronts.

He’s already in conflict with the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the judiciary system, his own Justice Department, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve and his secretary of defence.

Almost two-thirds of the most important White House positions have changed hands during Trump’s first two years, according to a Brookings Institution study tracking administration personnel changes.

That is way more than any of the past five US administrations saw as of the two-year mark. Although the report doesn’t count multiple departures from the same position, some of the White House’s top jobs have turned over more than once.

This is a president who is on his third national security adviser, for example, and his fifth communications director.

THE Trump administration’s haemorrhaging of human resources is extraordinary even in the context of typical Washington churn.

It’s perhaps not surprising then that Trump won few legislative victories in 2018, despite his Republicans controlling both houses of Congress. His endlessly trumpeted “wall” with Mexico for example has yet to find funding.

But Trump did score big in getting approval for his nominees to fill two Supreme Court seats, as well as dozens of federal judge vacancies.

Justices and federal judges are for life, so Trump’s conservative picks will influence US society and politics for a long time to come. The stakes also became dramatically clear in the fight over the second Supreme Court candidate, Brett Kavanaugh, pictured below, right, who was almost derailed by unproven, decades-old sex assault allegations.

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As public concern fuelled by the #MeToo movement mounted, Trump wavered. Not for long, though, before he came out fighting to belittle the woman accuser.

The Senate’s tense approval vote of 50-48 marked a massive victory for Trump, but also yet another deepening of partisan divisions.

“At the midpoint of his term, Trump has grown more sure of his own judgment and more cut off from anyone else’s than at any point since taking office,” the New York Times observed last week.

Like other American news outlets it quotes West Wing insiders who describe a president so concerned about being watched too closely, he retreats to his residence.

A man some say who spends ever more time in front of a television.

As the ultimate narcissist he might simply be tuning in to watch himself. If so, 2019 seems set to see him on air even more than ever.

Seen through Trump’s own eyes of course 2018 was a roaring success.

“Nobody’s ever done a better job than I’m doing as president,” he told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward earlier this year.

The reality of course is something else entirely. Take for example the annual G7 summits, which group the world’s seven richest democracies, and are usually cosy affairs.

It was all so different when Trump arrived in Quebec, Canada in June where the gathering ended in unprecedented acrimony after Trump attacked allies for using the US as a “piggy bank”, defended his imposition of tariffs against western trading partners, and got in a name-calling spat with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

With a final flourish, Trump torpedoed the traditional joint communique and a photograph showing the president sitting grumpily in front of other G7 leaders came to epitomise what some saw as an unravelling of western unity.

Then there was that other quite remarkable summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

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Trump, the former real estate developer, reckoned his charm and business instincts could get Kim to give up his country’s nukes and make peace.

Many ridiculed Trump, pointing to the absence of concrete steps afterward by Kim. But after decades of unproductive US sabre rattling and military standoffs, Trump also won plaudits for trying something new.

“We fell in love,” Trump said later, waxing lyrical over an exchange of letters with his unlikely new friend Kim. But the fact remains that little really has moved on since then between the two men and their countries with no sign of permanent denuclearisation.

There is something wonderfully ironic about that fact that while 2018 was characterised by Trump’s in-your-face style, 2019 seems set to see Washington’s quietest man become his potential nemesis. For it’s special counsel Robert Mueller who even more than Trump himself controls the president’s fate as the year closes.

The relentless march of Mueller is bolstering the possibility that Trump won the presidency by colluding with a hostile foreign power – Russia – and tried to enrich himself in the process.

And as 2018 winds down, the signs are that the ultra-discreet Mueller is gearing up for big revelations.

“Phony Russia Witch Hunt” and “conflicted prosecutor gone rogue” are just two snippets from the president’s recent torrent of anti-Mueller tweets.

When Trump goes on a Twitter offensive it usually means he himself is twitching uncomfortably. While Trump used to believe himself untouchable, once boasting that he could get away with shooting someone in public, that confidence shows increasing signs of slipping.

“Never forget that everything Trump does is about saving his own skin,” observed the American journalist James Risen of the online journalism portal The Intercept last week.

Risen, like other Trump watchers, says the signs are everywhere now that Mueller’s investigation is intensifying and closing in on the president and the crooks around him.

WHAT’S worse, from Trump’s point of view, is that in January the Democrats will take over the House of Representatives from his Republican enablers, making it far more difficult for the president to get rid of Mueller.

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Until November’s midterm elections, it was common for Trump critics to lament that he paid little price for his excesses. But the midterm results showed, in a quantifiable way, that Trump’s belligerent and erratic behaviour does carry a cost.

Trump’s second year in office is ending where it began, in turmoil. As senior editor of The Atlantic magazine, Ronald Bronstein, pointed out this week Trump approaches the New Year engulfed in three distinct crises, all of which he ignited with his own actions.

The first is the diplomatic crisis precipitated by abruptly announcing his intention to withdraw American forces from Syria, triggering the resignation of Defence Secretary James Mattis.

The second is the crisis forced by his demand for $5 billion in funding for his border wall and, the third is the financial market crisis he’s instigated that has seen US markets seesawing through the worst December since the Great Depression.

Yes, all in all it’s been a political rollercoaster of a year at the hands of Trump.

“When we look back on 2018, it may not be to recall all the crazy things that happened when Donald Trump was president. A year from now, it may appear as the quiet before the storm,” observed New Yorker columnist Susan B. Glasser last week.

She has a point. Another year of Trump’s political wreckage now lies behind him. His year of reckoning however might just lie around the corner.