But NeverTrumpers feared that Mr. Trump’s own cruelty, narcissism and sexual incontinence would make the job of remoralizing the country that much harder, a goal they prioritized over tax cuts, deregulation and judicial nominations. As the controversial conservative social scientist Charles Murray told us in the summer of 2019: “You can’t have a successful limited government unless you have a population that itself is virtuous. And so, that means character in the leaders is important, not just so they can perform a job effectively. It’s extremely important as an emblem of what the country’s all about.”

Many NeverTrumpers who held important positions in previous Republican administrations agreed. These conservative critics of Mr. Trump recognized — if only in outline — that the president’s personal pathologies that would lead to something like his disastrous management of the Covid-19 crisis. While most Republicans focused on Mr. Trump as an ideological and cultural bludgeon with which to pummel their enemies, NeverTrumpers foresaw that his character and governing instincts would have unpredictable and terrifying consequences.

When we spoke to Pete Wehner, a veteran of three Republican administrations (and a Times contributing Opinion writer), in 2017, for example, he emphasized that judging Mr. Trump purely by his willingness to wage partisan war on behalf of Republicans was an erroneous standard, given the unpredictability of the president’s agenda. “There’s just too many things in the presidency that you can’t anticipate … You ultimately have to depend on the wisdom and prudence, the insight of an individual. And Donald Trump strikes me as … somebody with a disordered personality. I think he’s emotionally and psychologically unstable, and is temperamentally dangerous.”

Throughout the Covid-19 crisis, the inability of President Trump to strike an elevated, sober tone that reflects the seriousness of the moment has been clear for all to see. Philip Zelikow, who was a top deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, emphasized to us in 2017 that, “In government, you’re often in a world in which there are lots of different ceremonials associated with appropriate behavior — funerals, commemorations — and I think all of this just tends to maybe give a stronger consciousness of the expectations for an American president and what an American president represents.”

Mr. Trump’s inability to shape himself to the ceremonial character of the presidency has a long track record, going back to his bizarrely improper tone in his visit to the C.I.A.’s Memorial Wall the day after his inauguration. This failure has had grave consequences in his response to the current pandemic, as during his trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, when he not only passed along erroneous information, but quite implausibly talked up his acumen in the field of medical science and returned to his “perfect” phone call with the Ukraine president.