Donald Trump is so uniquely different from any prior president that nobody's gonna follow in his footsteps.  It took a large personality, a penetrating mind, enormous self-confidence, and sheer physical energy to do what he's done.  Not to mention plain old guts.  While the temper of the times also had a great deal to do with him getting elected, that's probably true of all presidents.

Little commented on is how he flushed the media into the open like so many quail.  No longer can they pretend to be honest brokers who love America as much as anybody.  They don't, and Trump has forced them to show their colors.  In a business that's supposed to be above the fray, they are bitterly partisan, lying to us daily in a shameless bid to control the national agenda by controlling the national narrative.

Trump knew this from the outset.  In his books, he paints the media exactly the way he paints them today: spiteful, venomous, low down, dishonest.  He does not hide his contempt for these vipers or even try to get along.  Rather, he picks fights with them.  Those who rue this behavior may not grasp that this is how he steers the narrative.  It also keeps his enemies on the defensive.

Trump has said and done things one might wish he hadn't, but his tactics have repeatedly proven effective.  The thing is that we're not accustomed to presidential decisiveness, which accounts for his frequent personnel changes.  Where a career in politics trains one to proceed slowly and cautiously, a career in the marketplace (or on the battlefield) trains one to act quickly to minimize bad effects or take advantage of a fleetingly good situation.

This has earned the president enmity far and wide.  He recognizes the vital elements in a given decision, and his own experience base is so broad that he doesn't need much propping up from advisers.  He listens but reserves decisions to himself, as he should.  His limiting principle is reality; when he sees someone or something not giving good results, he makes a change.  This is simply common sense.

Most everything Trump's criticized for is actually something he should be praised for.  At the least, judgment should be withheld in view of his spectacular successes.  That that does not happen is yet another way the president forces the media into the open.  We on the sidelines can only gape in admiration, cheer him on, and do our best to get this force of nature re-elected.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.