Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail says Trump just wants to watch the world burn, which I think is a good way of putting it.

It is hard to assess how much Donald Trump is the cause of his country’s disintegration, and how much the consequence. Suffice it to say that the times brought forth the man: the perfect embodiment of all the fears and resentments – of foreigners, of minorities, of liberal elites – of the Republican base.

They found in Mr. Trump a vehicle for their nihilism and their rage, perhaps the least suitable candidate for high office in the entire United States – a petulant, insecure man-child, so wholly lacking in intelligence, competence, integrity or emotional stability as to be disqualified in most states from driving a bus, let alone leading what was once the most powerful country on Earth.

Driving a bus, though, is a very skilled and high-stress job, if you think about it (and/or if you ride buses a lot). Trump is definitely the last person you want to see at the wheel.

That was the point: to invert every norm or expectation, not only of public life, but of ordinary human behaviour; to render those norms and expectations, by a combination of their callousness and his shamelessness, impotent. The point was to “send a message,” although as Mr. Trump and his enablers in the Republican political class intuited, the message was less of rebellion than credulity.

The results are all around us: the world’s worst death toll from the novel coronavirus; the worst economic collapse since the Depression; the worst race riots since 1968. Mr. Trump wasn’t the immediate cause of any of these, but he has made each measurably worse, whether by the incompetence of his administration, the incoherence of his policies or the toxicity of his rhetoric. Elect someone to blow up the system, it turns out, and you will be picking up the pieces for years.

The U.S. accordingly gives every indication of coming apart, torn along lines of race, class, ideology and region, with Mr. Trump gleefully pulling at each frayed seam. Every institution of authority that might have mitigated the damage has been attacked and undermined. Every belief or movement that might have exacerbated it – racists, gun nuts, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists of all kinds – has been cultivated.

And torn along other lines too. There are the lines of political orientation, related to moral orientation. There are the lines of egotism versus public-mindedness. There are the lines of being an absolute shit at all times versus not doing that. There’s the embrace of hatred and violence and domination versus trying to do better than that.

Worst of all has been the collapse of trust. It is true that Mr. Trump can be trusted to always do the worst possible thing in any situation – to do it not in spite of expert recommendations to the contrary, but because of them.

But even here the sense of bad faith is inescapable. He does things not because he believes in them – for he does not believe in anything – but because they make him feel good in the moment, or because they might benefit him in some way. He lies, not because he wants to be believed, but to advertise his disdain for the very notion of truth as distinct from falsehood. He gives orders, not because he has anything he wants done, but as tests of loyalty for his underlings.

I think that’s right. There’s no there there. Lots of pundits still claim he’s diabolically clever but I don’t think so – I think he’s random in the way Coyne describes, and that his randomness is what his fans love about him.