EVEN THE STUFF HE GETS CREDIT FOR IS MISTAKEN:

There is one policy area, however, in which President Trump's actions have been absolutely indefensible: his incompetent handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. He saw the disease as a threat not to the nation but to his personal interests. He downplayed it in the first two months of 2020, allowing cases to grow exponentially. When he finally admitted that Covid represented a serious crisis, he pivoted to a rapid reopening of the country, which led to another huge rise in infections and deaths during the summer. Over the past two weeks, Trump's insouciant attitude has led to the White House becoming a virus hotspot, with more infections--including that of the president himself--than in the entire country of Taiwan. In short, the Trump administration's Covid response has been a policy failure of huge proportions, one that reflects basic incompetence in governing capacity and will be studied as such for decades to come.

Institutions

The second and much more significant disruption involves basic American institutions and the way in which Donald Trump has weakened them. American constitutional government is built around a system of checks and balances in which an elected leader of the executive branch is constrained by a host of other branches and bodies. When Trump and other conservatives today bemoan the breakdown of the rule of law, they are referring to violations of the law by protesters and violent rioters. No one should tolerate violent protest, but the deepest meaning of the rule of law is not that ordinary people should obey the law. China, North Korea, and Cuba do not permit violent protest, but they are not rule-of-law states. The rule of law means that the king himself should be under the law--that is, law should apply to the most powerful political actors in the system.

This is something that Donald Trump has never understood. In a pattern that began long before he was elected president, Trump sees the law as an instrument of his self-interest: He will use it to sue competitors or bludgeon political opponents like Hillary Clinton but ignore it when it touches upon his family's own interests. His 2016 campaign was clearly guilty of accepting help from Russia, and he sought to use congressionally appropriated funds to extort help from Ukraine to further his re-election. In all these cases he has waged a scorched-earth campaign to discredit any institution or individual that sought to apply the law against him: the U.S. intelligence community, the FBI, the special prosecutor, his own attorney general, judges and courts, and the mainstream media outlets that he has called "the enemy of the American People." He has acted like a Mafia boss, imposing a code of omerta on his Republican followers in the Senate so that they were unwilling even to hear testimony from witnesses who might have challenged the president's storyline during the impeachment hearings. Trump has been doing his utmost to undermine Americans' confidence in the legitimacy of the November election, apparently believing that it will go against him. As he has sunk steadily in the polls, he has gotten more desperate, calling on his attorney general to open criminal investigations against his rival Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama. This is the behavior of an authoritarian ruler.

Norms

The third disruption lies in American society's normative health. Leadership is more than the aggregation of policies and decisions that leaders make; it is also made up of the moral tone that these leaders set for the society as a whole. It is for this reason that conservatives habitually argued in decades past that presidential character matters. Yet is it hard to imagine an individual with worse character than Donald Trump. He is a habitual liar who lies about big matters and inconsequential ones. He is uninformed about the issues he must deal with and sees no need to seek better information. Over the years of his presidency, his tendency to promote crackpot conspiracy theories has only gotten worse. Trump sees everything through the lens of personal self-interest and is vindictive towards friends and foes alike. And he has seen his self-interest as lying in a widening of the huge partisan division that has gravely weakened the United States.

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