The latest national CNN poll offered all kinds of terrible news for the White House, but one number stood out: 58%. That’s the percentage of Americans who said they consider the first year of Donald Trump’s second term to be a failure.

It’s an easy conclusion to draw. As the anniversary of the president’s second inaugural generates a robust round of reflection and lookbacks, the evidence of the Republican’s failure is overwhelming. It was a year marked by scandals and corruption, power-grabs and lies, violence and abuses, revenge tours and broken promises, shredded alliances and the destruction of institutions — both metaphorical and literal.

Since the dawn of modern public-opinion polling, only Richard Nixon had a lower approval rating at the end of his fifth year in the White House — and by the summer of his sixth year, Nixon resigned.

With this history in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the broader pattern.

In 2020, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the Center for Presidential Transition published a memorable report on “the fifth-year curse,” which took note of a curious historical phenomenon. “While the president’s fifth year should be a symbolic and substantive fresh start, it is often marred by political infighting, major crises, and failed legislative agendas,” the report explained.

Several years earlier, in 2013, Politico had a related report on the trend.

[T]here’s just something about Year Five itself — some immutable law of the American political calendar that condemns our presidents to a miserable time after their second inaugural. Maybe it’s about presidents and their re-election hangovers, or their opponents’ renewed determination to thwart the White House agenda, or perhaps it’s simply the problem of the public’s inevitable fatigue.

While there’s no reason to take seriously the idea of an actual “curse,” there’s no denying the fact that a great many presidents have struggled in their fifth year in the White House. In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fifth year, for example, the legendary Democratic president backed off New Deal spending, which reversed economic progress, and tried to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.

But that’s just the start. The Watergate scandal broke during Richard Nixon’s fifth year. The Iran-Contra scandal broke during Ronald Reagan’s fifth year. Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky began during his fifth year. George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security in his fifth year, helping set the stage for Democrats to take back Congress a year later.

There are competing theories to explain why “the fifth-year curse” endures, but I tend to think it comes down to one thing: hubris. By Year Five, presidents not only start to have an exaggerated sense of their powers and skills, they also know that they’ll never again have to face the electorate.

Trump, fueled by an authoritarian vision, goaded by sycophants, and emboldened by a Congress led by partisans who expect to be treated like doormats, took this to new depths over the course of his fifth year, embracing the idea that he can do as he pleases, disregarding laws and institutions at his own discretion, constrained only by his twisted sense of his own “morality.”

While American history is filled with some catastrophically bad presidential fifth years, those who study the “fifth-year curse” should prepare for a dramatic new chapter to their work — because instead of trying to avoid the historical scourge, Trump rushed headstrong into it, producing the worst Year Five of them all.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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