The only way your thinking is off is that you're still giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he had any shred of competence, it would have been easy for him to come out ahead. Covid alone should have created a landslide reelection - defer to the experts, reassure the nation, and enjoy the wartime president boost. But he has no idea how to accomplish anything, only how to be a zero-sum business bully.

Objectively the scumbag is getting blamed, but he doesn't care. He's been running businesses into the ground his entire life. When the news media applies any sort of judgment to his behavior, he cries "fake news" and whines that they are biased. Being impeached and acquitted seems to have emboldened him - there is no other way to remove him short of the next election or a 2nd amendment recall.

Yet there is a death cult that still supports him, because they think he is a savior fighting against the corrupt power structure (while he's really yet another leech). Any bad news they hear about him is a confirmation of the supposed conspiracy against him (see today's buried post about the QAnon cultists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24158598). The real question is how many of his casual republican base supporters have become quietly disillusioned with the 170k dead and the police riots, which is hard to get a sense of online. The 2016 consensus was that he would not win, and yet he did. Back then I was trying to explain to my democratic friends why he had a decent shot. This time I think he will be sent packing, but it's impossible to know. We're all just holding our breath, waiting, and hoping that the country can recover from all of the damage he has caused.