Hectoring won’t work on Trump,

There may come a time when the people closest to President Donald Trump succeed in reining him in. But no one familiar with the president’s Twitter feed, or his pronouncements since assuming office, would bet on that.

So the question becomes, how to anticipate him? Is it even possible?

There’s good news and not-sogood news, on this front. First, notso-good: Trump is proving to be even less governable by staff than was expected. His insistence on debating the numbers of people who attended or saw his inauguration, and his claims of massive electoral fraud (despite there being no evidence of this) have made it impossible for the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, to hew to a consistent message.

That said, it’s not all chaos, from a Republican standpoint. For one thing, there’s a kind of raucous consistency to much of what Trump says off the cuff.

Just as his outside-the-beltway voters were likely happy with the familiar tenor of his inaugural address, despite its being panned in centres of power around the globe, his tweets and other musings are of a piece.

He’s either venting at the media, or talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, or cracking down on inner city crime, or building a wall on the Mexican border, or keeping terrorists out.

It is a simple message. It repeats. To that extent, it has become predictable.

Then there are the executive orders, piling up by the day. These too, agree or disagree, have been in keeping with Trump’s long-standing promises. There have been 12, at this writing. They range from seeking to replace ObamaCare, to freezing federal hiring (except in the military), to banning U.S. funding for overseas abortions, to approving oil pipelines, to ordering construction of the Mexican border wall (with no specifics on how it will be paid for), to cracking down on illegal immigration, to pulling out of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.

The sweep of Trump’s social policy is sharply rightward. The sweep of his economic policy is sharply leftward. In other words, it’s a reversal of what a libertarian or classically liberal president would do.

It is revolutionary in that sense, which is why it is so profoundly jarring for anyone raised amid the more-or-less stable liberal orthodoxy that has been our frame of reference for the past 70 years.

But it should not be said to be shocking or unexpected, because Trump has been vowing to take these steps for months. The speed with which his administration has moved in a sense makes life easier for governments and business leaders trying to cope. Trump’s cards are on the table.

We know, because no one in Washington, D.C., is bothering to be delicate about it, that Mexico’s US$58-billion manufacturing trade surplus is the president’s first major economic target. We can assume the border wall will be, in many places, a fence, and that construction will begin soon.

We can further assume that a threat of curbs on individuals’ remittances to Mexico from the United States will be used as leverage to extract payment. Combined with pending curbs on Mexican imports, this means the North American Free Trade Agreement is dead, though neither the U.S. nor Mexico has yet triggered its sixmonth exit clause.

The Canadian response to this looming earthquake, and the potentially even greater one of U.S. trade war with China, has so far been as sensible as anyone could have hoped.

It’s obvious the social aspects of Trump’s agenda — specifically his administration’s position on abortion, its pending curbs or bans on immigration from some Muslimmajority countries, its expected curbs on refugees — are anathema to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s brand of Liberalism. It’s equally clear the president’s course is set, and not subject to being moved, one way or another, by Canadian hectoring.

So, Trudeau and his ministers have not hectored, instead focusing on areas of commonality; the desire for policy that reverses income inequality, and Canada’s importance as America’s largest manufactured-goods export market.

Future irritants, we can expect, will be addressed matter-of-factly. Opportunities and unexpected gifts, such as Trump’s conditional green-lighting of the Keystone XL pipeline, will be welcomed enthusiastically.

There will be a moment, perhaps soon, when Trudeau is called to reassert Canada’s tradition of pluralism, openness to immigration, generosity to refugees and international co-operation. We can expect he’ll do that.

But based on his approach so far, it will be in the vein of expressing what Canadians intend for this country, rather than finger-waving. Presumably there will be no hyperventilation of the kind that occurred in 2004 when Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish stomped on a doll of President George W. Bush.

It’s matter-of-fact, and in a sense opportunistic strategy. It requires discipline and restraint, and is in no way dramatic.

But it’s the only smart way forward, given that Canada remains, to restate Pierre Trudeau’s old analogy, a mouse sleeping with an elephant. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers have so far focused on areas of commonality with the Trump administration.