Which Donald Trump will we get?
Ken Herman says we’ve seen Stump Trump and Teleprompter Trump — but now we’ll see what President Trump will be like.
AUSTIN — So, fellow inhabitants of a stunned nation, we’re going to get an answer to a question that’s been on our minds since a certain flamboyant businessman came down an escalator in one of his glitzy buildings on March 18, 2015.
Oh yes, some of us had a good laugh that day about that guy’s candidacy, but the moment set in motion a movement that has led to this question now that he’ll be our president: Are we getting Teleprompter Trump or campaign Stump Trump?
A candidate’s tone tends to change when he or she becomes an officeholder, a pivot from hot and challenging campaign-trail rhetoric to levelheaded leadership. None of us have ever seen a potential gap quite like this one. But none of us had ever seen a candidate quite like Donald J. Trump. And it’s possible — probable? — he’ll be a president unlike any we’ve seen.
The earliest indication of what he’ll be like — the bombastic Stump Trump who says what pops into his head or the more-measured Teleprompter Trump who sticks to script — was a positive one. It came at the top of his early Wednesday morning victory speech.
“I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton,” Trump said. “She congratulated us.”
Suddenly, Crooked Hillary had become Secretary Clinton, as Trump (or whoever wrote the words loaded into the teleprompter) realized the weight of the moment and the words he’d fill it with. The riff ended with this: “Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely,” Teleprompter Trump said.
That was in some dissonance with Stump Trump’s endless drumbeat about how Clinton had accomplished nothing during that long period of time and how she shouldn’t have been allowed to run for president and how he’s going to appoint a special prosecutor to launch a criminal probe into her felonious crookedosity.
At Trump rallies and the Cleveland convention at which he was nominated, Clinton was the “her” of “lock her up, lock her up” as Stump Trump whipped his followers into near-frenzy.
But in the victory speech, Teleprompter Trump was all peace and love, even in the scant few ad libs added for emphasis. He inserted a “have to get together” into a scripted line about “it is time for America to bind wounds of division.”
Moments later he reeled off a to-do list.
“We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,” he said. “We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none, and we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”
And in words that seemed to soothe trembling world markets, he vowed to “get along with all other nations willing to get along with us.” That’s a reasonable foundation for a foreign policy.
But there was no talk of a wall, not a whimper about prosecuting Clinton nor a hint of following up on Stump Trump’s vow — enthusiastically received at his rallies — to rewrite libel laws to make it easier for a politician to go after anybody who dares to utter a discouraging word about him or her.
Many of the 59 million Americans who voted for Trump did so based on some or all of the promises made by Stump Trump.
So we’re left with two questions about the wall and prosecuting Clinton and backing out of trade deals and repealing Obamacare and muffling free speech and deporting millions of foreigners here illegally and bringing jobs back from China and placing a religious test on immigrants and wiping out ISIS by the time baseball spring training begins next year. Will he? Can he? There’s little precedent for any president accomplishing so much of such magnitude.
Stump Trump — ever defiant, never in doubt — always said he could and would do all that and more. Teleprompter Trump tended to tone it down a bit. Now all that matters is what will President Trump do?
Devoted Trump backers, fully entitled to we-told-youso glee following a victory many thought impossible, are expecting a lot from him. And what’s the possible consequence of disappointment if President Trump doesn’t deliver on the cocksure promises of Stump Trump?