[h]is presidency ended in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, when he chose — yes, chose — to litigate rather than lead, to attend to his wounded pride instead of his wounded nation and to debate the supposed fine points of white supremacy.

He abdicated his responsibilities so thoroughly and recklessly that it amounted to a letter of resignation. Then he whored for his Virginia winery on the way out the door.

Trump knew full well what he should have done, because he’d done it — grudgingly and badly — only a day earlier.

Bruni steps on his gas pedal:

. ...[H]e put id before country and lashed out, in a manner so patently wrong and transcendently ruinous that TV news shows had to go begging for Republican lawmakers to defend or even try to explain what he’d said.

Those lawmakers wanted no part of him. The same went for the corporate chieftains he considers his peers. And for the generals he genuinely reveres. The heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all went out of their way to issue statements condemning the hatred that Trump wouldn’t take on. A soft coup against a cuckoo: It confirmed how impotent Trump had become.

On dismissing Bannon:

On Friday Trump finally dismissed his polarizing chief strategist, Steve Bannon. That’s excellent. And irrelevant. A president’s team doesn’t matter when he himself is this lost.

He cites another NY Times article:

In The Times, Michael Shear, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush reported that several of his top advisers couldn’t see how his presidency would recover. “Others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job,” they added.

He quotes an article in Axxios, "Trump's 7 Months of Destruction."

Bruni argues that Trump never wanted to be President, not even on the day he went down an escalator to announce his bid.

He revealed that repeatedly as he rejected the traditional rules and usual etiquette, refusing to release his tax returns, bragging about his penis size, feuding with the Muslim father of a fallen American soldier and electing puerility over poetry at nearly every meaningful moment.

Because of his victories in the Republican primary and then the general election, his campaign was hailed for its tactical genius. But it was driven by, and tailored to, his emotional cravings. All that time on Twitter wasn’t principally about a direct connection to voters. It was a way to stare at an odometer of approval and monitor, in real time, how broadly his sentiments were being liked and shared.

Bruni talks about Trump's laziness before the election and defiance after. On the health care bill debacle:

... members of Congress who met with Trump about the repeal-and-replace of Obamacare were aghast at his ignorance of the legislation and of the legislative process itself.

A president is supposed to safeguard the most sacred American institutions, repairing them if need be. Trump doesn’t respect them. He has sought to discredit and disempower the judiciary, the free press, the F.B.I., the Congressional Budget Office. He even managed to inject politics into, and pollute, the Boy Scouts. This is the course of a tyrant.

Bruni says Trump didn't fail to lead, he didn't want to lead.

He consciously decided that he didn’t care about comforting or inspiring those Americans — a majority of them — who weren’t quick and generous enough with their clapping. He was more interested in justifying himself.

So he picked division over unity, war over peace. And make no mistake: He didn’t merely shortchange the presidency. He left it vacant.

I think Trump is incapable of leading. I think he garnered support from rich Republicans in the business community who believed he would undo Obama's policies, and that his campaign stumbled upon the rural pockets of angry, marginalized white Americans that were motivated by their bizarre hatred of all things Clinton and Trump pandered to them like he pandered to his rich business supporters, telling them: "I'm not interested in ideology, I'm interested in creating economic opportunity." And both groups were so blinded by what they thought he was going to do, they failed to see that their new emperor had no clothes.

But, as Bob Dylan once sang, "sometimes even the President of the United States must stand naked." If Bruni and the other media seers are right, it's only a matter of time. Since Trump's body isn't any prettier than the rest of him, let's just hope he turns off the lights as he exposes himself for the last time and walks out the door.