Trump wants to run on his record. We hope he does. It's been a disaster for America.

At some point during the debates, perhaps more than once, Donald Trump will say yet again that he has accomplished more in his first term than any prior president. Despite his penchant for lying, it is hard to deny that among all our presidents, his record does stand out — just not in the way he wants you to think it does.

Trump has presided over the worst U.S. public health catastrophe in more than a century. His leadership failures during that crisis — from lying to suppressing data to promoting quack cures to endangering his own supporters in mass gatherings without masks or social distancing — have led to nearly 205,000 COVID deaths. That's many more per capita than other developed nations, in some cases more than double their toll.

Trump's mishandling of the COVID pandemic helped produce the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression — including an unemployment rate of nearly 15% in April. Some estimates suggest that over 40 million Americans lost their jobs as a result of the crisis. Only a fraction of those jobs have returned. Some will never return.

Economic and environmental harm

Economists predict that the unemployment rate through the end of the year, even with recent improvement, could average about 10%, roughly the same as during the worst of the Great Recession a decade ago. In fact, as a recent advertisement for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has made clear, Trump has the worst job creation record of any president in our modern history.

The gross domestic product contraction of 31.7% in the second quarter of this year, on an annualized basis, is by far the largest recorded in U.S. history. According to economists tracked by Bloomberg, the annualized growth rate under Trump’s first four years under a reasonable projection for the remainder of his term is likely to be 0.6%. That’s the worst since Herbert Hoover, about a quarter of the growth level under Barack Obama, and just about a seventh the average growth rate during Bill Clinton’s eight years in office.

As a result of the crisis, today 1 in 5 mothers of children under 12 reported that their children were not getting enough to eat.

America’s international standing has also been hammered under Trump. Under Obama, 74% in a Pew Research Center poll of 32 countries had confidence in him to “do the right thing” in international affairs. Only 29% felt Trump would and that was in January, before the COVID-19 catastrophe. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin ranked higher.

This is the toll of Trump attacking our allies, tearing up international agreements and undermining international institutions. Then came the crisis. In a new Pew poll, the U.S. image plunged around the world, in some countries to record lows.

On environmental policy, nine major green organizations rated Trump the “worst president for our environment in history.” Last year, nearly two-thirds of of Americans called the president’s record on the environment "poor” or “fair.” A new study from the Rhodium Group says Trump regulatory gifts to polluters will put an additional 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2035 — according to The New York Times that's “more than the combined energy emissions of Germany, Britain and Canada in one year.”

Some of the areas in which Trump claims a great record are downright offensive — like his assertion that he has done more for Black people than “any president since Abraham Lincoln.” This is belied by his defense of white supremacist groups with his “very fine people on both sides" rhetoric, his abuse of Latin immigrants at our border and his constant use of racist dog whistles.

He is one of only two U.S. presidents to be impeached by the House during their first term in office, one of only three ever to be impeached and the only president to have ever been impeached on national security grounds.

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He is the first ever to have been credibly accused of betraying his country to a foreign power. In 2016, and again this year, he has sought the support of foreign enemies to win the election and has taken other active measures, like undermining the U.S. Postal Service, to gain an unfair advantage. He is the only president to be accused of serial sex abuse, tax fraud and violation of emoluments clauses in the Constitution.

He denigrated our troops and refused to rise to their defense when credible reports suggested Russia had put a bounty on the heads of Americans serving in Afghanistan. He even refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the upcoming election.

Shocking Trump corruption

No president has been associated with so many people charged with criminal conduct, and no administration has been home to such sweeping corruption. And that’s despite having a Justice Department that has sought to lift the president beyond the reach of the law and a record of packing the courts with unqualified and extremist judges.

The result of all this is that historians and political scientists have concluded there is a key metric by which Trump stands apart from all other presidents. He is the worst.

The president repeatedly says he wants to run on his record. Of course, what he says about that record is not true. (That’s another area he leads all presidents — by a mile. According to fact-checkers at The Washington Post, by July he had made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims.) But when you look at the truth of the damage Trump has done in his four years in office, if you care about America’s future, you can only hope that like Trump, all Americans want to make the 2020 election a referendum on his record.

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Let it be a vote on failing to rise to the greatest challenge he faced, the pandemic, and a vote on economic performance and the staggering costs of bad policies. Let it be a vote on corruption. Let it be a vote on his attacks and those of his attorney general on the rule of law, a vote on sending armed federal forces to intimidate peaceful protesters. Let it be a vote on undermining our allies, supporting our enemies and pulling out of international agreements that made us safer. Let it be a vote on children in cages at the border, on the empty promise that Mexico would pay for that wall, on tax cuts funneling the lion's share of benefits to America's wealthiest, on not caring about COVID victims if they are Democrats, or too old, or people of color.

Let it be a vote on a record that is historically, mind-bogglingly bad, a record of destroying lives and livelihoods, of weakening America and putting our democracy in peril. So, yes, please, Mr. President, let’s discuss your record. And then, more important, let’s get out and vote on that abysmal record. Vote early if you can. Help others to vote. But whatever you do, recognize that the only way to end this record of abuse, corruption, failure and damage to our country is to remove from office the man who is responsible for it.

Trump wants to be part of history. There is one way to ensure that happens sooner rather than later. Vote.

David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) is host of "Deep State Radio" and CEO of the Rothkopf Group media and podcasting company. His latest book, "Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump," will be published in October. Bernard L. Schwartz is the CEO of BLS Investments, former CEO of Loral Corp. and publisher of the Democracy journal.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Make 2020 election a referendum on historically disastrous Trump record