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Excerpted from a Time magazine article (read it here):
“Few other Presidents in modern history so inflamed the nation.”
“Trump’s pride didn’t just precede his fall, it precipitated it. … Trump thought he could wish away a deadly virus. He dismissed his legions of critics … [and] governed as President only of his base …. He barely articulated a policy vision for a second term.”
“It all finally caught up to him. The lies, the outrageous boasts, the disorder and disastrous management, the rants and the race-baiting, the predatory instincts and compulsion to dominate—all the things that made President Donald Trump the ringmaster of the American political circus at last compelled a majority of voters to drive him out of the tent.”
“Trump’s presidency was marked by scandals and controversies as varied as they were alarming. He refused to face the roots of the country’s racial disparities and doubled down on a message of white grievance.”
“Trump was defeated because of his failure to connect on the thing that voters most cared about, which was coronavirus. … By midsummer, when Americans had lived circumscribed, fearful lives for months, many of the voters who had supported Trump in 2016 had soured on his leadership. … What voters heard was a candidate focused on his own problems, not theirs.”
“How lasting the changes Trump has wrought for our democracy remains to be seen. The rifts he created will not be easy to repair. The 2020 election proved there remains a strong market for the grievance-fueled politics he’s selling.”
“These failures have made Trump the one thing he was raised to fear most: a loser.” It’s worse than that: He’ll almost certainly be rated as one of America’s worst presidents. And yes, he has both an impeachment and a reelection defeat on his resume.