If there was a single day in 2020 that set the course for the worst year in modern memory in America, it might have been Wednesday, Feb. 5. That was the day the U.S. Senate voted to keep President Donald Trump in office, against overwhelming evidence that he flagrantly abused his power by trying to strong-arm Ukraine's government into investigating political rival (and now President-elect) Joe Biden. We'll never know how a Mike Pence administration would have handled the worst-in-a-century pandemic, the economic crash, the racial reckoning and the rest that would unfold in the ensuing months. But it's unfathomable that it could have been handled any worse.

The confluence of traumatic events that will make 2020 a historic benchmark would have happened under any president. But the traits that critics had long warned made Trump unfit for office — his xenophobia and racism, his distrust of science, his tendency to divide rather than unite the country, his willingness to just plain lie — hampered America's ability to confront these unprecedented challenges at every turn. Eleven months after most Senate Republicans voted to put party ahead of country, the country is reeling.

The facts behind Trump's House impeachment were undisputed: He withheld military aid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to announce an investigation of the Ukrainian business dealings of Biden's son, Hunter Biden, to give Trump a 2020 campaign issue. It was an ironclad case of abuse of power, yet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made clear in advance that the Republican-controlled Senate would acquit Trump. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney's explanation for his sole Republican vote to convict was eerily prescient: "Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine."

Even as Congress grappled with what looked to be the defining story of 2020, the story that would dwarf it was quietly taking hold in Washington state. There, officials on Jan. 21 reported a single case of the novel coronavirus. By late February, the illness had spread to a total of 15 Americans. Trump predicted on Feb. 26 that those 15 "within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero."

By year's end, more than 330,000 Americans would be dead, and the economy decimated.

Trump couldn't fairly have been expected to comprehend the full scope of the threat early on. Few did. But Trump's response as the crisis came into focus will likely be ranked by future historians with President Herbert Hoover's response to the Great Depression: a combination of denial and ineptitude that allowed the worst-case scenarios to unfold unimpeded.

Instead of ramping up a national testing program, as experts implored, Trump wasted precious weeks on a strategy of wishful thinking that the virus would just go away. He repeatedly contradicted the government's own experts, promoting quack cures and pushing to keep the economy open when shutdowns were the only defense. He showed zero interest in coordinating any semblance of a national response, at one point threatening to withhold life-saving medical equipment from states whose governors don't "treat us well."

Trump refused for months to publicly don a mask and ridiculed those who did. More than anyone, he fostered the bizarre and dangerous situation that persists today, with political conservatives treating masks as an infringement on liberty. Trump reinforced that message again and again at packed, mostly maskless rallies that became superspreader events - even after contracting the virus himself in October. If Trump had been paid off by some hostile foreign government to ensure that the pandemic would hit America as hard as possible, it's difficult to imagine what he would have done differently.

By late May, a pandemic-weary nation, already angry over the glaring failures of its own institutions, suddenly had something new to be angry about: A video of Black, 46-year-old George Floyd slowly dying as a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck.

Floyd's death lit a summer's worth of protests across the nation, some violent. The movement engulfed statues honoring Confederate officers, which came down from pedestals across the Old South. Polls showed for the first time that majorities of white Americans acknowledged the existence of systemic racism in law enforcement.

Trump, predictably, seized on the protests to divide Americans, using the strife to launch a Nixon-esque "law and order" campaign trope. As part of it, his underlings on June 1 used tear gas to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington so America's most irreligious president could pose in front of St. John's Church with a Bible.

Unlike Richard Nixon, though, Trump wasn't able to rally even his own party to his side this time. Late in the year, with remarkably little fuss, Congress passed a defense spending bill that removed names of Confederate leaders that had adorned military bases for generations — and passed it with bipartisan, veto-proof margins, over Trump's threats.

If the pandemic and the protests were 2020's unpredicted thunderclaps, Trump's post-election assault on democracy was as predictable as it gets.

For months before the election, Trump openly undermined faith in the vote. As states expanded mail-in voting options in deference to the pandemic, Trump announced bluntly that he wanted to deny funding to the Postal Service to hamper it. He insisted only votes reported on Election Night should count, which would disenfranchise millions. Warnings became routine that the public should expect late-breaking changes to the vote counts due to mail-in voting, and that Trump could be expected to sow disinformation about that if he lost.

Trump stuck to that script like an Oscar-winner. After losing to Biden Nov. 3 by 7 million votes and a clear Electoral College margin, Trump took to Twitter to claim — with absolutely no evidence — that mass vote fraud had undermined the election and that he'd actually won by "a landslide." His legal teams were tossed from one court room after another as they tried to get judges to discard millions of votes based on nothing. Trump personally harangued swing-state Republican officials trying to get them to overturn their own voters.

Trump's antics were unsurprising, but the sycophancy of most elected Republicans, continuing even until now, was jolting. Refusal to utter the words "president-elect Biden" became a twisted form of virtue-signaling in the GOP — and an affront to the record-setting 81 million Americans who voted for the Democrat. The specter of 126 House Republicans, including all six from Missouri, endorsing a national lawsuit seeking to disenfranchise millions was ominous confirmation that the current threat to democracy goes far beyond Trump.

Still, this lousiest of years ended on an unlikely high note: By December, the Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed" paid off with the record-fast development of two coronavirus vaccines. The shadow on the horizon, though, was America's resurgent anti-vaccination movement, driven in part by Trump's own uneven messaging about vaccines throughout his presidency.

Trump himself initially declined to publicly receive a coronavirus vaccination, a move that could have encouraged millions of hesitant Americans to take it. Instead, that first high-level vaccination example was set by none other than Pence — the man who would have been president through it all, had the Senate done its duty 11 months earlier.

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