Hurricane Maria has been the one real test of presidential leadership Trump has faced. We can see the results. In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, Trump was busy tweeting insults from his New Jersey golf club and campaigning in a special election in Alabama. When he did engage, he praised his administration’s response and complained that Puerto Ricans weren’t doing enough to help themselves.

Experts acknowledge that Hurricane Maria would have challenged any president. “The basic model for a FEMA response is that the state and local authorities lead, and FEMA comes in to support their recovery effort,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who headed U.S.A.I.D.’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under Barack Obama, told me. In Puerto Rico, where the whole island had been devastated, that was impossible.

But it’s precisely because FEMA isn’t set up to handle situations like Puerto Rico that we needed a capable president. “When a government agency needs to do something it is not designed to do, it takes a lot of very disciplined, rigorous White House leadership” to make it happen, Konyndyk said.

As an example, he mentions the Obama administration’s successful response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Neither U.S.A.I.D., the Centers for Disease Control, nor the military was equipped to address it alone. “It’s very easy in that instance for a government agency to just default to doing things the normal way,” Konyndyk said. In such circumstances, someone with a big picture view needs to figure out innovative ways to marshal America’s resources.

Trump will never be that someone. And Hurricane Maria is highly unlikely to be the last grave emergency to happen on his watch. Experts are predicting another bad hurricane season this year, though not as terrible as 2017. As Konyndyk points out, every president since Ronald Reagan has had to deal with some sort of novel disease outbreak, including H.I.V., SARS and avian flu. Other, unforeseen calamities will take us by surprise. And we have a president that cannot sit through a briefing or do serious preparation of any kind, who has hollowed out the government and filled key posts with lackeys and grifters.

Puerto Ricans have been the first American citizens to really feel what it means to have a president who is so wildly unable to fulfill his responsibilities. It’s hard to imagine they’ll be the last.