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Being far from the United States for a couple weeks, scanning news from home for just minutes daily over morning coffee, gave me a new appreciation for the metaphors about the clarifying view from 38,000 feet or seeing the forest and not just trees.

President Trump is perhaps best viewed at such distance. If anything, the big picture is less flattering still, ugly even.

At home, with the 24/7 daily drubbing of news alerts on phone, laptops and TV, each Trump outrage, controversy or scandal is soon forgotten amid attention to the next. We’re inured to our reality-show president, who sees each day as a new episode for him to be both showrunner and star. But seen from afar, all at once, somehow the threads come together in the patterns that show just how dangerously flawed, flailing and, yes, failing this unprecedented presidency is.

Over the first half of this month, as early voters began passing judgment in midterm elections, the broader patterns of the crazy quilt that is Trump 2.0 were clear. More in chronological order than of outrageousness and national or global consequence, those patterns included:

His embarrassing and willfully provocative obsession with branding things, buildings (even adding his name to a memorial of a slain president!), bodies of water and now states.

“Hello, New America, formerly known as New Mexico,” Trump greeted residents on Oct. 3 in his video endorsement of a Republican candidate there. (He spoke from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, once more ignoring historical norms against using the trappings of office to partisan ends.) Days later, he proposed to rename either the Pacific or Atlantic as “Trump Ocean” and declared that anyone who referred to “Artificial Intelligence” instead of his preferred “Super Intelligence” is “THE ENEMY!” (Of course, Elon Musk and other ever-capitulating tech titans fell in line, again. No command is too dumb, as Trump knows: At a rally in Kentucky last week, he boasted that tech moguls “kiss my ass.”)

His antidemocratic refusal, despite his oath, to be president of all Americans.

He regularly attacks, penalizes and now, it seems, wishes........

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