Looking more like President of just his fan club

This was Donald Trump back in his America now, the America of airplane hangars like the one in Melbourne, Fla., late Saturday afternoon, the true believers in the crowd in front of him cheering everything he said, even when he was talking about some incident in Sweden that sounds like it may have been the most devastating terrorist attack since the last one Kellyanne Conway pulled from thin air. This was Trump at his best — or worst, depending on your point of view — still running as hard as ever, having told the pool reporters on the short plane ride from West Palm Beach to Melbourne that everything is a campaign with him. And why not? The roar of the crowd is a lot more fun than having to govern, doing everything you promised you would do.

Really, more than anything else, this was the real beginning of President Day weekend for him. President, singular. Him.

But the problem, no matter how much Trump can still be carried along by the roar of his crowds, is that he eventually will have to become more than just the President of them; President of the men and women wearing their Trump hats and carrying their homemade signs and yelling at the reporters. These are the same kind of cheerleaders around whom he has surrounded himself, and not terribly unlike the Republicans in Congress. Those phonies, all those Paul Ryans, just don’t wear the hats.

It has quickly reached the point where you want somebody to show up in the West Wing and be what a wise old baseball man named Gabe Paul used to be with Trump’s pal George Steinbrenner, when Steinbrenner ran the Yankees in the same Barnum way that Trump wants to run America.

“My job with George was saying no,” Gabe Paul told me once.

Filling up government jobs, trying to find somebody to take Michael Flynn’s old job as national security adviser, isn’t nearly as intoxicating as mixing it up with all those other Republican contenders, with Lyin’ Ted and Little Marco and Low-Energy Jeb, and then finally in the general election with Crooked Hillary. Now, of course, he is looking to knock the Dishonest Media and Fake News through the ropes, as his fanboys in the bullhorn media, Trump’s media, tell you that people trust him way more than they do the media.

But at some point, he has to be more than the President of 39% of the people, or 40%, whatever it is, who legitimate polls say approve of the job he has done since he was sworn in on Jan. 20. By the way? It’s hardly even a month ago, even though sometimes it seems that he has already been President longer than FDR was. At some point you hope that he can figure out that as much as he seems to thrive on chaos, reasonable people, the ones not wearing the hats and carrying the signs, do not. And that includes reasonable people who were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He’s already won the airplane hangars. He’s already won over the people who, truly, must believe that the calls Flynn made to Russia made themselves, and that even though Flynn ended up losing his job because of those phone calls, Flynn is still the kind of great American who once would have planted the flag at Iwo Jima. And for the last time? If the leaks about Flynn are real but the news is fake, what does that make the news about the leaks?

But you see how this goes. There is no room here for honest dissent or disagreement. If you even attempt to call BS on any of this, then you are a dishonest enemy of the people. Because in the view of this White House, and flacks like Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer — would anybody pick either one of these guys in a Washington, D.C., fantasy draft? — the media is now almost as big a threat to the American people as ISIS.

I asked Pete Hamill about all of this on Saturday, Hamill being somebody who honored the newspaper business and thus honored the media from the time he began writing for the old New York Post in 1960. Hamill: Who once did such amazing reporting and writing from Vietnam. The great Pete Hamill: Who was there in Los Angeles the night his friend Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. I asked Pete if he and Jimmy Breslin and giants of the business ever saw themselves as enemies of the state.

“We sure went to a lot of places where we never saw Emperor Donald,” Hamill said. “And actually helped people, one at a time.”

Helping people is the job now, not already running to keep the job. Trump talked a great game at that airplane hangar on the weekend of President Day, singular. He always does. Loves talking to his people the way they love him. When does he start talking to the rest of us?