Trump told us what kind of president he would be.

Follow Us Get the newsletter Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Let's say goodbye and good riddance to President Donald Trump with three lessons everyone should learn from his failure of a presidency. The first lesson: Believe politicians when they tell you who they will be in office. Trump campaigned as a bigot. He campaigned with contempt for learning the basics of government and public policy. He campaigned as a would-be authoritarian with a fascination with violence and no interest in the rule of law and republican institutions. He campaigned with disdain for the truth. These attitudes, and not anything he said about policy — much of that was either nonsensical or confused — were his real campaign promises. And, unlike his policy promises, Trump's attitudes amounted to pledges that he followed through on once in office.  The second lesson: The White House, as presidency scholar Richard Neustadt wrote 60 years ago, is no place for amateurs. Trump never did learn how to use the powers of the office to influence the other legitimate players in the governing process. He never understood how to use information to his advantage. Instead, he starved himself of information outside of what he saw on Fox News and what played well at his rallies. He failed to build a formidable professional reputation, which (as Neustadt would have predicted) badly weakened his bargaining position. It didn't help that he was a historically unpopular president. The result? Botched administration of government; policy initiatives (such as health care and infrastructure) that never got around to being launched; other policy attempts that were too sloppy to survive court challenges; and an administration of free agents and loose cannons who pursued their own policy preferences regardless of the damage it did to the president. The paradox of presidential weakness: The less Trump could get done through the normal policy process, the more he retreated to things he could try to do himself or by evading rules and norms, thereby threatening to turn the nation into a lawless autocracy.  The third lesson: Parties risk much by nominating someone they cannot trust. In some ways, Republicans were lucky with Trump. He was willing in almost every instance to go along with what they wanted, notably by ceding control of judicial nominations. But even a weak president has some influence, and Trump used his to build up the most radical wing of the party at the expense of its conservative mainstream. Trump's power within the party had little to do with how popular he was with Republican voters. It derived, and still derives, from the plain fact that everyone knows he has no significant loyalty to the party and wouldn't think twice about harming it. Thus, to pick the most recent major example, Trump was able to hold most of the party hostage to his false claims of election fraud because it was plausible that he would tell his strongest supporters in Georgia to stay home on the day of special Senate elections earlier this month and deliver the Senate majority to Democrats, something that no other modern president would ever have done.  1. Dave Hopkins on Trump's failure of a presidency. 2. Amy Erica Smith at Mischiefs of Faction on Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro 3. Matthew Shugart on how to defeat extremism in the House of Representatives by using proportional representation. 4. Jordan Tama at the Monkey Cage on investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. 5. Kathryn Dunn Tenpas on how long it normally takes to get a cabinet confirmed by the Senate. 6. Ta-Nehisi Coates on what Trump has been all along. 7. Susan Glasser on Trump. 8. Perry Bacon Jr. on President-elect Joe Biden and bipartisanship. 9. Philip Klein on Trump's unpopularity. 10. Marc Ambinder on the upcoming challenges for the Secret Service. 11. And Michael Kruse talks with Trump biographers, including my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O'Brien. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. Unsubscribe | Bloomberg.com | Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022