In 2017, I wrote the following:

No, I do not like Donald J. Trump.

But that doesn’t matter. He was elected President of the United States by the Electoral College. A good argument could be made that the Electoral College is a relic of a more sexist and racist time in our country, but until that argument is successfully made in terms of amending the Constitution, it’s still the way our Presidents are elected.

And the fact that I do not like Donald J. Trump does not mean that I wish him to fail. In fact, I would like to see him become so successful and effective in leading the country that we would miss him after his second term. And that’s a possibility, no matter how remote it seems right now, especially since one of his first official acts was to cancel or delay a cut in mortgage insurance rates, essentially raising the cost of buying a home for some new homeowners by about $500 a year. Wouldn't bother him, but it may be a big problem for a lot of young families.

It didn’t take long for me to see that my optimism, as cautious as it was, was misplaced. Nothing that he did during that first term made me (or the majority of voters) want him back. We had seen him govern by Twitter, staying up in the night to call people he didn’t like degrading names.

We had seen him appoint people to his cabinet who were not only unqualified but were actively hostile to the departments that they were overseeing.

We had seen him throw our Kurdish allies under the bus, kotow to dictators, and fantasize being like one of them when he grew up. It was reported that he shared classified Israeli intelligence with a Russian diplomat.

We had seen him brag before the UN General Assembly, and they laughed in his face.

We had seen the Republican idea of tax reform, giving money to the corporations and to the rich, proving once again that the trickle-down theory is really a myth.

Then we had seen him faced with the greatest crisis of his administration and mismanage it, hamstringing the experts, sending mixed messages, and—by his own admission—lying to the American people. Thousands of people died because of it.

Then we watched in real time as he encouraged his followers to fight, and to march to the Capitol. He went back to the White House and watched them assault Capitol police for several hours on TV. When he was told that they wanted to lynch Mike Pence, he is reported to have answered, “So what!”

When he left the White House, after being fired by the American people, he took government documents with him, lied to the government about returning them, and when the FBI recovered them, files marked “Top Secret” or some other level of classification were found empty. We don’t know who he shared those with.

The fallout from his first term and the lies following it have left many of his more prominent followers in dire straits, with plea deals that obligate them to “testify truthfully,” in debt for millions because of suits brought against them, and disbarred for attempting to subvert the election system.

It was, in all, a miserable sort of drama.

Now, having seen all of that, we have elected him president again, and I don’t have even the cautious level of optimism that he will rise to the occasion that I had in 2017. I’m sure he won’t, and I’m sure that the sycophants surrounding him have learned from the first term. The primary lesson is that you cannot have adults in the room. They thwart the Leader’s plans.

Of course, they don’t last long, either. So this time, he’s vowed to make sure that those around him are aligned with ideology (if they can determine what it is). He will also try to have 50,000 civil service employees reclassified so that they lose their civil service protections, and we march forward to the beginning of the 19^th century.

He says he’ll pick his people more carefully this time, that in his first term he didn’t know anybody because he was not of Washington.  That may have accounted for the fact that he had a 91% turnover rate in four years, compared to Reagan’s 78% (eight years), Clinton’s 74% (8 years), and Obama’s 71% (eight years). In four years, Trump had four chiefs of staff, four press secretaries, four national security advisors, and six communications directors. The life expectancy of a Trump staffer was short.

He also says that he’ll go after an alarming number of people, all of which may be loosely grouped under the heading of people who don’t agree with Trump. He’s said he’ll use the National Guard and even the Military on American soil. All that, of course, while he’s deporting 12 million people.

He will, as he has, pander to the Christian Nationalists, the White Supremacists, and any number of other groups (e.g., America First) who want to exclude and punish significant parts of our citizenry.

And he’ll alienate our allies, making them see us, as they did during his first term, as unreliable.

However, even with all that, I don’t think he’ll bring the country to its knees. He’ll hurt it. He’ll hurt our reputation at home and abroad. But in our nearly 250-year history, we’ve lived through inept presidents, dumb presidents, megalomaniacal presidents, and presidents who didn’t share the ideals enshrined in our Constitution.

What we haven’t done in those 250 years, however, is re-elect one who embodies all of those characteristics. We are, I fear, slow learners.

Pray for the Republic.