Debra J. Saunders, American Spectator April 30, 2017

Which is the real Trump?

There are two ways to look at President Donald Trump, observed Lee Edwards, distinguished fellow of conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation. One is that Trump is “a feckless idiot” who is “almost dysfunctional.” The other is that “this man actually knows what he’s doing.”

Which is the real Trump? At a Heritage symposium on Trump’s first 100 days in office, Edwards went with the second option. He said he believes Trump “very cleverly” does what many politicians do — get the opposition to underestimate them.

“This is more work than in my previous life,” Trump told Reuters on Thursday. “I thought it would be easier.”

Was this an attempt at getting Democrats to underestimate him? More likely these remarks are just another example of Trump being Trump — a supremely confident and perennially impulsive billionaire who just admitted that he underestimated how difficult it is to actually be the leader of the free world.

People often forget that presidents are human beings — with great strengths that carry with them corresponding weaknesses. Trump voters went with the brash billionaire, because he was a nonpolitician who promised to shake the Washington power elite to its core.

The flip side of that coin is that, as an outsider, Trump doesn’t have any experience navigating Congress. And as a true outsider, he hasn’t tried particularly hard to hire top staffers who know how. It is no surprise, then, that Trump’s first foray into the sausage making of legislation — his bid to repeal and replace Obamacare — fell flat, even though his party controls the House and Senate.

Trump’s behavior in his first six weeks in office handed his critics ammunition to fire back at him. As he took the oath of office, Trump did not use the occasion to reach across the aisle, as he did during his election night acceptance speech.

The next day, as anti-Trump marchers filled the streets of Washington and other cities, Trump sent out Press Secretary Sean Spicer to launch his first press conference haranguing the news media for its “shameful” reporting on the size of the new president’s inauguration crowd on the Capitol Mall. READ it HERE