To render even a semi-definitive historical judgment on a president before his (or, theoretically, her) term of office has expired is considered premature. In the case of Donald Trump, this popular understanding is wrong.

Trump will not have his Robert Caro treatment for decades. But his abdication of responsibility during the coronavirus pandemic—perhaps the most serious national challenge since World War II—will not cease to be a fact, and by itself merits a directed verdict. Trump has called himself a “wartime” president, but FDR did not leave the war to the governors. He certainly did not dismiss the threat posed to the U.S. by Japan after Pearl Harbor.

The basic contours of the Trump presidency are already knowable: the elevation of a politics based on racial division, with an agenda driven by personal hatred of the first black president; the systematic hollowing out of a functional, professional federal government, department by department; the disregard for seasoned, expert advice in the realm of military, foreign, and scientific affairs; the desire, frequently consummated, to divert the course of impartial justice and subject it to political control; the addition of cruelty to the federal-policy toolkit pertaining to people of color, immigrants, the poor, the sick, and many others; the willingness to sway opinion through lies, fear, and mockery; and the attacks on the press as an “enemy of the people,” recycling Orwellian language to discredit independent sources of objective information and actual truth.