In the years just before Donald Trump’s ascent, political commentary increasingly aspired to a quasi-scientific style of analysis, with data journalism in all its forms supplanting the old-fashioned emphasis on hunches, narratives and vibes.

In the Trump era, though, the mythic has had its revenge on the merely quantifiable. The data is still useful, in its place, but now even pollsters talk about their “art,” and like strange birds in the Roman Forum, the more unlikely outcomes have come home to roost. The roles of charisma and “fortuna” have been reasserted, Thomas Carlyle and Shakespeare and the Coen brothers have been surer guides than any science, and primal forces, from plague to war to presidential senescence, have played decisive parts.

So as we enter into the Trump restoration, any auguries about the next four years need to be adequate to this mythopoetic landscape, and dramatically fitting in the fate that they envision for both the president and the United States.

The challenge for would-be entrail readers is that Trump’s first term already offered a seemingly complete dramatic arc. A presidency defined for a long time by black comedy tipped over into tragedy when Trump finally faced a threat he couldn’t overmaster — a deadly pandemic, originating in the Communist country he had come to power promising to challenge and contain, that sent him to the hospital and his re-election campaign to defeat. Then by reacting to his political downfall by descending into the conspiratorial labyrinths with Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, Trump gave the whole story a suitable denouement: hubris, nemesis, madness, good night.

Yet now he’s back again, resurrected politically via the very strategy of prosecution that sought to fully bury him, boosted by a miraculous-seeming escape from an assassin’s bullet, triumphant over all his enemies and elevated to greater heights of power and influence than at any point in his first term. So what does a mythically minded punditry suggest should happen next?

One possibility is that because we have already seen Trump at his lowest point, for a second term to be surprising, remarkable and aesthetically fitting, it needs to deliver him to glorious success. And not just low-unemployment and calm-in-the-Middle East success, but a true fulfillment of his original 2016 campaign promise — American greatness restored, on a scale that baffles his enemies and amazes even his supporters.