Lessons from a week of governing dangerously

As much of the world alternated between gasping at this week’s White House news and taking mental health breaks from it, Bobby Steele was soaking it in, gleeful.

Steele supported Donald Trump from the beginning, and the new president was doing exactly what he had promised.

“He don’t talk about getting things done. He gets ’em done,” said Steele, 53, a grocery store manager in northwest Florida. “He told you on the campaign trail what he was going to do, and day one, he started doing it.”

A week into his tenure, Trump has managed to validate his supporters’ biggest hopes while also confirming his critics’ worst fears. For voters who sought a conservative-nationalist shock to the liberal-multilateralist order, he has done nothing to worry them. For voters who worried that he might blow up the planet in a petty rage, he has done nothing to reassure them.

Trump has acted swiftly on several of his key campaign promises, even some of the ones his allies had suggested were mere strategic metaphors. Through a blitz of executive orders on immigration, Muslims, trade and health care, he has made clear that he intends to govern as he ran.

And through a stream of needless lies, outlandish boasts and impulsive fury-tweets, he has made clear that he intends to serve as commander-in-chief while behaving as unsteadily as he did when he was running.

The first polls of his tenure reflect what is shaping up to be a historically divisive early presidency. In one of them, by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, Trump had an 81-per-cent approval rating among Republicans and a 4-per-cent approval rating among Democrats.