But when it came to Donald Trump, Eliot Cohen said in his later post, the normal pattern didn’t apply. In reckoning with the man, his capacities, and his effects, early impressions held up later. What Cohen thought at the beginning of Trump’s term, he believed all the more strongly a year further on: “I think now as I did then that Trump will not grow into his job, ‘because the problem is one of temperament and character,’” he wrote, quoting himself from one year earlier. “There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him.”

The immediate news frenzy surrounding Trump this past week has made me, too, think back on evolving assessments of the man and his times. (I’ll think of this as a “Looking Backward” installment, mainly because I’m always looking for ways to call attention to Edward Bellamy’s Gilded Age novel of that title.) What we’ve learned about Donald Trump in his time in office is surprisingly little. What we are learning about our country is significant, for better and worse.

Of the man himself, even the latest dramatic news has been remarkably unrevealing, because so much was there in plain view by Election Day. Here I’ll follow Eliot Cohen’s lead and quote something I wrote just over a year ago, in July 2017, after returning to Washington, D.C., from six months away—away from the city, and deliberately away from national news—while writing a book:

The fact that Donald Trump wound up as president is a surprise in historical terms—and to me, since I asserted in mid-2015 that no one so inexperienced could be elected. Of course I was wrong, and stopped making any predictions about him after that. But nothing Trump has done as president should qualify as surprising. For any step he’s taken in these past six months—the tweets, the public feuds, the lurches back and forth in policy, the norm-breaking and information-gaffes—there’s a link back to some moment during the campaign. What the Atlantic said in its editorial urging a vote against him was based on what Trump had shown as a candidate but has borne out through his time in office: “We believe in American democracy, in which individuals from various parties of different ideological stripes can advance their ideas and compete for the affection of voters. But Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office, and voters—the statesmen and thinkers of the ballot box—should act in defense of American democracy and elect his opponent.”

I have given up being upset or surprised by Trump. It is like being upset at a toddler for throwing his food. He cannot help himself, or what he does. He is the man we knew him to be.

The ongoing surprises involve reactions to this flawed and impulsive figure. A year ago, I argued that there were reasons for optimism about parts of American’s institutional response to Trump—and also reasons for concern bordering on despair.