Donald Trump tours the grounds during a practice round for the WGC-Cadillac Championship at the Trump Doral Golf Resort & Spa on March 6, 2013 in Miami, Florida. Photograph by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images.

Given the nation’s problems, from the unsettling situation along the Korean Peninsula, to the destruction left by Hurricane Harvey, to general income inequality, to terrorism, to climate change, our timing in bringing a man like Donald Trump into the White House really couldn’t be worse. The man is clearly unfit for any kind of public office, let alone the highest office in the land. The majority of the electorate knew this when they went to the voting booths. His “many sides” response to the events in Charlottesville during his horribly eventful, 17-day vacation sparked a run on his remaining popularity. (As Trump’s better, Winston Churchill said, “I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”) The members of the president’s vaunted business panels left him. The members of his arts panel left him. The Republican leadership blanches at the mention of his name. His popularity in the swing states he won is on a downward spiral. Even charities that had booked space for their fund-raisers at Mar-a-Lago, his mid-market wedding-and-birthday rental facility, are pulling out. He still has the neo-Nazis and the racists, which must give him some comfort. This is going to sound unkind, but why are supremacists invariably the worst specimens of the race they are claiming to defend?

With normal presidencies, history often takes its time reaching a verdict. But once in a while, the verdict arrives with the speed of a tweet after an imagined slight. Judging from the assessments of six distinguished historians—see “History’s First Draft,” such is Trump’s grim fate. His time in office, like so much of his life, will be deemed a corrupt, messy shambles. The only lingering question is the extent of the damage he will have done by the time he is forced out of office.

Reading the essays by Jon Meacham, Stacy Schiff, Robert Dallek, Edmund Morris, A. Scott Berg, and Garry Wills, you come to the realization that our 45th president resembles none of the others—there is no true parallel. He is a mutant. In terms of temperament and judgment, he is the opposite of a Monroe or an F.D.R. He may be as intellectually hollow as Reagan, but he lacks Reagan’s humor, grace, and core of principle. He may be as psychologically disfigured as Nixon, but he lacks Nixon’s intelligence and stamina.

As Robert Dallek points out, Trump parts company with all previous chief executives when it comes to any president’s central task: seeking to unite the country. The president’s initial silence after the violence in Charlottesville and then his public statements giving succor to racists and anti-Semites have torn the national fabric. And the president has torn that fabric deliberately. As he sees it, to inflict wounds is a sign of strength. To heal is a sign of weakness. The chaos of his office—pitting one side against another—has been writ large over the whole country. Trump has always been on the opposite side of a moral red line from the rest of us. With Charlottesville, he has ushered the ugly, fringe elements of our culture into the main room and given them a seat at the table.

As the six historians point out, the Trump presidency is unprecedented in many ways. It is certainly unprecedented for a president of the United States to bring a largely untested daughter and slightly dim-witted son-in-law into the West Wing as two of his most highly placed advisers. In a White House where preying partisans have turned the people’s business into a form of room-to-room combat, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have the advantage of being untouchable. But as Sarah Ellison notes in “Bland Ambition,” they may ultimately be among the administration’s biggest losers. Their influence with the president on anything important has been negligible—they are no match for his urges and appetites. The modest social standing they once enjoyed in certain precincts has eroded badly—indeed, they are pariahs in what was once their natural habitat. Kushner, a man in his mid-30s with no experience other than running a real-estate business (badly), has been put in charge of everything from re-inventing government to calming the Middle East, a portfolio that has so far produced nothing except fodder for late-night TV monologues. As my colleague Wayne Lawson used to say about doughy, pampered adult males, he looks as if he was taken out of the oven too early.