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.

Melania Trump’s success in avoiding further controversies, after her plagiarized-speech embarrassment nearly one year ago, is to her credit. Tiffany Trump has had the best PR run of the adult children, in that she’s mainly stayed out of the news. The mild surprise about the rest of them—Jared and Ivanka, Eric, and of course now Donald Jr.—is how unaware they appear to have been about the difference between running a family business and representing the president of the United States.

For Ivanka, this showed up (inter alia) in her unselfconsciously taking her father’s seat at the G20 meeting, a role that in other administrations would have fallen to the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, or some other constitutional officer. For Jared, it showed in the assumption that without any previous experience he could run half a dozen major portfolios, any one of which had been as much as James Baker, Leon Panetta, George Shultz, William Webster, or other bureaucratic masters and veterans had handled. It also showed in his assuming that the security-clearance form that asked for recent contact with representatives of foreign governments didn’t need to be taken seriously, or wouldn’t be checked. For Eric, it showed in the assumption that of course business and government interests would intersect. (Compare Trump family business with this 1988 letter from George H.W. Bush, as he ran for president, to his son, George W., about avoiding even the appearance of conflict of interest.) For Donald Jr. — well, you know.

But maybe, as with their father, such missteps are more unfortunate than unexpected. None of them had been part of anything like this before.