Trump began his campaign in 2015 as an ideologically mixed populist who looked like he was having fun stirring things up. He has governed as an angry, incompetent right wing populist, kowtowing to the worst of the GOP economic agenda. That is why his fate looks like Carter 1980.

Go back to 2015 videos of him - not just the kickoff speech. It’s clear how he cultivated a following. But it’s also clear how he betrayed any reformist instinct. His real political downfall was his embrace of the GOP health care approach - replace ACA with basically nothing.

But that just revealed how his whole act was pure bullshittery. He needed to gain support of the GOP right wing from Ted Cruz to win. And once he did, he based his Presidency around serving them alone (though in his own Trumpian way).

This is analogous to how Carter fell apart politically between 1976 and 1980. In 1976, Carter ran as a reformist, moderate Southern outsider who would reform the system after Watergate. But he was perceived as caving in to the more leftward elements of Dems - though not enough.

Then he faced a series of economic and foreign policy crises that weakened him further. He still held on to much of his 1976 base in the rural South in 1980. They still remembered him as ole Jimmy from Plains, GA. But he lost everybody else.

Carter was ultimately perceived as just too incompetent, and his excuses for the country’s failures - “there you go again” - were interpreted by Reagan as part of a larger failure to confront left wing orthodoxy. Ironic bc the Left abandoned him too.

Trump in 2020 thus suffers from his own personal incompetence, extreme petulance, and captivity to GOP orthodoxy (except on trade) at a time when those polices are very unpopular. Unlike with Ted Kennedy’s run and the Left, however, the RW base today is still wedded to Trump.

If Trump loses badly, the RW elements will pretend they never really backed Trump at all. The original Trumpers (a bit more ideologically mixed) will either disengage politically or turn to intensified conspiracy theories (Q-Anon as post-Trump revanchist movement).