Let’s see if he can deliver

Now we see. We see, starting Friday when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th President, if he can run the country as well as he ran for the office, if he can do as well when the opponent is Little Vladimir Putin as he did when it was Little Marco, and Lyin’ Ted and Crooked Hillary and all the rest of them. Or we will begin to find out, and right away, if he is going to be like a fighter punching himself out on things that don’t matter and shouldn’t matter, when it is time to swing away on issues that profoundly matter to people in this country, jobs and veterans and schools and national defense and even the thing that has always mattered most about America to Americans, and that is honor.

We will find out, right away, if Donald Trump can somehow find the time to run the executive branch of the government when he is not making bull-like runs at “Saturday Night Live” and Rep. John Lewis and Meryl Streep and Chuck Schumer and NBC News and CNN and fake news, which is too often any news he doesn’t like; if he himself plans to honor all the amendments of the Constitution except the very First Amendment.

We will find out if his style of governance will be exactly as it was when he was a candidate, which means that no turn with him will ever go unstoned. Or maybe that is exactly the way it is going to be, and that he spoke a lasting truth about himself when I was talking to him one day last summer, as he was getting ready for the first debate.

“If they come at me, I’ll come at them . . . times 10,” he said.

So he did. And kept doing that. And one by one they fell away, as Trump began to write a story with one of the great shocking surprise endings in the history of presidential politics, whatever help and however much help he got near the finish line from hacks and James Comey, the FBI director who turned into a political hack, and Russia and maybe the Lannisters in “Game of Thrones.”

Somehow he had made it from the rough-and-tumble real estate business in Manhattan, from what you know he considers to be the home of his own royal family at Trump Tower, all the way to his new digs in Washington, saying anything he wanted and tweeting anything he wanted and litigating every single slight, real and perceived.

Now we see if he can back up all of his big, huckstering talk now that the games count.

The other day I asked Tom Hanks, who has spoken so eloquently about the country since Trump was elected — and somehow managed not to be called overrated the way Ms. Streep was — if anything that has happened since last Nov. 8 has made him particularly optimistic.

“Optimistic?” Hanks said. “No. I’m not the fatalist, yet, that many are — as in, let’s see the reality his administration brings. No one is clairvoyant, eh? But few of his appointments instill anything close to optimism, and most of what he says instills a pessimism — which is the opposite of what democracy should create.”

We will see, and quickly, with Donald Trump just to whom in his inner circle he is listening, if it is true that a headbanger like Steve Bannon, who became the patron saint of Breitbart, is really now the most powerful figure in the White House the way Dick Cheney, the Cersei Lannister of the George W. Bush administration, was for far too long with Bush. More than anything we will find out just how much of the big talk from Trump is just that: Talk, and more talk. Because starting Friday in this country, we don’t have to believe everything President Donald J. Trump says, just everything he does.

Everything changes now with him the way it changed so dramatically — and with such grace — when Barack Obama succeeded Bush eight years ago. This was still a change election. As high as the approval ratings that carry Obama out of office, enough people in America voted for change, even if Trump doesn’t come to the thing with the mandate he keeps telling us he has, a mandate like Putin’s in Russia, riding an electoral “landslide,” as if he were somehow elected by acclamation.

The outgoing President says that the country is going to be fine, and we will be, because the fact is that we are always better than our leaders in this country, even when those leaders head for the door with the 60% approval rating Barack Obama has; because no matter what, the center always manages to hold in America, the country’s great beating heart continues to beat, through Vietnam and Watergate and Lewinsky and a shameful and tragic war in Iraq.

If Trump fails, we fail. Tom Hanks, a decent and principled American, is right. So much of what Trump has said over the past two months instills pessimism. But the games didn’t count then. Now they do. Now we see.