Dear America,
Now that Donald Trump has gotten what he wished for, he has to put up because he didn't shut up. He started by going over to the New York Times (they apparently wouldn't come to him as a matter of principle) where he had to answer questions about things he claimed and promised during the campaign. And as the interview progressed, it became clear that he was only kidding about a lot of things. For example, he isn't going to lock Hillary Clinton up as he promised he would. He says she has had enough; "I don't want to hurt the Clintons. They're good people," he said. And as for "Obamacare"...well, maybe he was a little hasty about some of it, which he now thinks has to be saved, though which parts was left a little vague. They talked about The Wall, Syria and lots of other areas of candidate Trump's fulminations, and as it turns out, President-Elect Trump wants to keep an open mind now that he's gotten what he wanted by insisting that his mind was closed on these subjects...and many more. Climate change...the jury's still out. Expelling 11-14 million illegal aliens...well, we'll start with the criminals, and we'll see about the rest of them. I didn't read the interview, if a transcript even exists, but I heard accounts of it on the news...and of course I read some in the New York Times. It seems that in the name Donald J. Trump, the "J" stands for waffle, which is just about as reasonable as most of what he stands for. So, what does it all mean.
Well, to begin with, Donald Trump seems to be learning, albeit in small increments but rapidly, what "being presidential" really means. For example, sometimes you have to eat a little crow to get things done, such as his contemplated nomination of Mitt Romney for Secretary of State. He needs someone who can look like a sane, mature surrogate for the United States and be one in the bargain. That isn't Rudy "the self-promoter" Giuliani, and Trump isn't too dumb to see that, though some of his other appointments do point in the other direction on the issue of dumbness. He has also discovered that when he wants to fill positions in his cabinet, he doesn't want any from the now-proverbial basket of deplorables either. He did pick a rabid former general for his security team, but when it comes to education, for example, he doesn't want some experienced high level administrator from the plebian class, he wants a fellow sybarite who spouts off about vouchers whenever she gets the chance. After all, Trump won't want to send his young son, Baron, to a D.C. public school, he'll want him to go to Sydwell Friends with all the other monied minority kids in The District, and someone has to pay for it, so it may as well be the government. He's got his Vice President, Mike Pence, to liaise with Paul Ryan and the former anti-Trump contingent of The House and The Senate, which will be a necessity if Trump actually wants to get anything done by the end of the next four years, or until he gets impeached for taking an emolument from a foreign government, whichever comes first, and no doubt someone on his campaign team thought that up in advance...another stroke of pragmatism. Then there's the Times interview itself, which the old, pre-election Trump would have blown off after making the excuse he made about changing terms for the event...changes that he wanted to make it turns out. He apparently realized that the other leaders of the western world read the New York Times, and what they say matters, so he had to get into their good book if he wanted to have any chance at all not to be savaged in print every time he did something stupid.
The signs are all there. Trump won't be the radical he claimed he would be because he can't do it alone. He now understands that he needs congress, which isn't about to cede its power to him so that he can grab the limelight, not to mention the credit, credit being his absolute favorite thing in one way or another. And he needs the press too, because without good press, the bad kind that got him elected won't do him any good at all. My guess is that the next lesson he will learn is that Twitter is a vice in his case, not an instrument of governance, and he will desist in demanding apologies and ranting about this thing that he doesn't like or that one. It's reality time in the Trump camp, and only time will tell whether it is going to serve him or us. We can hope though, can't we.
Your friend,
Mike
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