Advice Lady knows: There are three different Trumps

Dear Advice Lady: Everybody is saying how reasonable President Donald Trump sounded in his big speech to Congress, but it made me crazy! I was yelling at the TV the whole time. If he bothers me this much when he’s trying to be statesmanlike, how am I going to make it through four years?

— Sincerely, Can’t Stand Trump

Dear Can’t Stand

Trump: Prioritize. If everything he says makes you start howling, your loved ones are going to stop paying attention to you. Or lock you in the attic.

— Advice Lady

C.S.T.: The stock market is booming after that speech! Just because they didn’t have to haul him off in a straitjacket! There’s such a thing as setting the bar too low.

A.L.: The key to understanding our president is to realize there are three versions. Unscripted Trump is the one who obsesses about crowd size and expresses complete astonishment that constructing a national health care plan is hard. That’s the one we worry will start a nuclear war.

C.S.T.: So the Dow went up 300 points because Unscripted didn’t show up to address Congress?

A.L.: Yep. The second version is Reasonable Chatting Trump. R.C.T. is the one who had pre-speech gatherings with journalists in which he mused about passing immigration reform and making the Dreamers legal. Everyone was very excited until it became clear this had no relation to anything he was planning to say in public.

C.S.T.: Then he walked in front of Congress and became Version 3?

A.L.: Yes, the guy with the teleprompter. We will call him Somewhat Normal Republican Trump, or SNORT.

C.S.T.: When he started off with a call for unity against anti-Semitism, I threw my sock at the screen. Just a couple of weeks ago, someone asked him about attacks on Jewish institutions and he just quoted his Electoral College numbers.

A.L.: True, we don’t normally expect to have to educate our new presidents in how to express disapproval of anti-Semitism. But just be glad he seems to have absorbed the lesson.

C.S.T.: And what about his rants about the inner cities? I hate it when he acts as if every place with black people is a death zone. But you can’t just say, “Stop picking on Chicago’s murder rate.”

A.L.: Try yelling: “Yes! Crack down on gun sales to gangs!” He finds it upsetting when anybody suggests the problem with gun violence is guns.

C.S.T.: I think I could definitely do that.

A.L.: You could also try giving Trump a thumbs-up whenever he says something you agree with. It’ll make you feel fairminded, and if he ever found out, it would confuse the heck out of him.

C.S.T.: In an hourlong speech, the only thing he said about the environment was that he wanted to “invest in women’s health and to promote clean air and clean water.”

A.L.: Well, that was SNORT reading. Reasonable Chatting Trump is crazy about the environment. He’s even worried about climate change. And Donald the Unscripted thinks environmentalism is an evil plot by the same people who bused millions of unregistered non-citizens to the polls to dilute his election triumph.

Take your pick. They’ll all be around for the next four years.