Yes, Trump’s done it his way

Franklin Roosevelt had “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Harry Truman had “I'm Just Wild About Harry,” John Kennedy had “High Hopes,” Richard Nixon had the unsingable “Nixon's The One,” and Barack Obama had several theme songs, but none that stick. That is the case, too, with Donald Trump. He's tried the Rolling Stones hit “You Can't Always Get What You Want,” but that, sadly, should be Hillary Clinton's.

My suggestion for Trump is “My Way.” It is, among other things, also his foreign policy.

One cannot watch his innocents abroad swagger through the China shop of bespoke diplomacy and not hum the tune. He cuts himself free from precedent. He says one thing in one place and another in another place. He criticizes Theresa May for the way she's handling Brexit and then praises her for doing what she had been doing all along.

He attacks the very worth of NATO and then says the U.S. is in for good. He pals up to Vladimir Putin and blames the previous administration for Putin's bad behavior, which is sort of like blaming the IRS for someone's tax cheating. He's at odds with his own Justice Department over the Russia investigation, calling it a “Witch Hunt” and then a “Rigged Witch Hunt,” stopping short, for now, of a “Very Rigged Witch Hunt,” which is surely on its way.

He lies when he chooses or tells the truth when he chooses.

To those whom life has constrained, who feel as tied down by precedent and expectations as Gulliver did by the Lilliputians, Trump is what used to be called “The Free Man.” I first heard the term applied to the Frenchman Jean Genet, a literary darling of the 1960s, who had been a petty criminal and male prostitute before he became a writer. He was seen as someone who had prevailed over bourgeoise morality and done pretty much as he damned well pleased.

Trump, too, is a Free Man. He doesn't use those words, of course — the literary allusion is beyond him. But several times he has declared himself a “genius,” by which he means that he sees things others don't — including an opponent's weak point. He sensed Marco Rubio's boyish hesitation and so he became “Little Marco.” Hillary Clinton became “Crooked Hillary,” which was a calumny and unfair, but stuck because to many Americans it seemed fitting.

This meanness, this love of the extemporaneous, this belief in the virtue and brilliance of one's own instincts, are the hallmarks of the demagogue and why, over time, they come to grief.

To the cognoscenti, to those panels of cable TV experts, Trump's performance in Europe is appalling, not to mention risky. But others may see it differently. He's a bull all right, but they have contempt for the China shop. Let someone else sweep up.

Sinatra understood the message of “My Way.” It became his anthem because he had come back from a dead career, because he brawled and cursed, drank too much and set his own hours.

“I've loved, I've laughed and cried, I've had my share of losing,” says the song. It goes on, “And may I say — not in a shy way, oh no, not me, I did it my way.”

Say what you will about Donald Trump, he did, too.

What the demagogue owes to Sinatra