The president who broke all precedent: Tom DeFrank

Renaissance, or Armageddon? It depends on whether you love or loathe Donald J. Trump, our against-all-odds, precedent-shattering 45th U.S. president.

Beginning with the final months of Lyndon Johnson’s second term, I’ve covered nine American presidents. Nothing in nearly a half-century of experience prepared me for the 10th.

Trump’s upset defies standard political measures. Improbable. Shocking. Unprecedented — no string of adjectives adequately conveys the Trump tsunami. American politics, simply, will never be the same again. Trump has fundamentally altered the business model of American elections. A Republican in Name Only, more or less, he was essentially a  minor-party candidate who skillfully engineered a hostile takeover of the GOP, making both major parties look silly.

He’s broken the mold by every imaginable yardstick. Trump may be the least prepared candidate elected leader of the free world overnight. He has no governmental or military experience, a modest grasp of geopolitics, attention-span challenges and little patience for briefing books or policy papers. He leads with his chin, his gut and blizzards of tweets, sometimes fact-free and ill-advised, that drive his aides nuts.

He has offended so many voter blocs, committed so many head-snapping verbal gaffes, that in another era he would have self-immolated months ago. But for an angry electorate more frightened than hopeful, Trump, warts and all, was the antidote to more of the same gridlock.

His electoral triumph cannot be denied, or minimized. Yes, Hillary Clinton was a poor campaigner, toting decades of political baggage, botching her email problem, and sounding evasive even when telling the truth. Despite her clear organizational and financial advantages and three impressive debate performances, Clinton’s flaws were a lethal drag.

What Trump could learn from Nixon: Column

Trump has Congress if he can keep it: Michael Medved

Yet Trump often exhibited exponentially greater personal flaws, gleefully trashing women, Hispanics, African Americans, political elites, protesters at his raucous rallies — anyone who dared criticize him, especially the hated news media. When caught peddling untruths, he doubled down. It didn’t matter; he never paid a price.

Why? As George W. Bush might explain it, the Washington establishment misunderestimated the disgust in the land, and Trump seized upon that national disenchantment.

Trump and his handlers understood that the politics of rage and grievance would dominate this election. Americans were sick of dysfunctional government, blaming both parties. When House Republican zealots forced an exasperated House Speaker John Boehner to quit, it should have been a wake-up call for the political class. Instead, they wrote Trump off as a billionaire blowhard bully, a certifiable joke.

The last laugh,of course, was Trump’s. He was a wildly imperfect messenger, but the only candidate promising to shake up the system.

So how does he govern? He could start with some humility.

Oftentimes there’s a tendency with incoming presidential regimes to believe their triumph, whether huge or modest, confers automatic omniscience, a monopoly on wisdom. Jimmy Carter’s Georgians, for instance, took enormous pride in ending what one of them described to me as “eight years of stinking, corrupt Republican rule.” The Obama insurgents, similarly, reveled in vanquishing the vaunted Clinton machine and its personal excesses.

I detect more than a whiff of that same hubris from the new president — and especially his we-won, get-over-it handlers. It’s understandable, but dangerous. Especially for a president elected with 46.1% of the vote.

His electoral triumph, though remarkable, was hardly a mandate. Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, and a few million of his “voters” have little use for him; they held their noses because they loathed Clinton more. These voters aren’t likely to migrate easily to his agenda.

Trump’s temperament also remains an open question. Even some Republicans involved in his transition worry he lacks presidential deportment and personal discipline. Since the election, he has dialed back the bombast some, and his dialogues with critics such as Mitt Romney, Bob Gates and Silicon Valley executives are hopeful signs.

Even so, calling out an Indiana union leader, picking an embarrassing public fight with the entire U.S. intelligence community over Russia’s meddling in the election, overturning four decades of bipartisan China policybefore taking office and tweeting incendiary, sometimes half-baked pronouncements are troublesome.

During the campaign, Trump’s halting grasp of policy detail suggested he often didn’t know what he didn’t know. Now he does — beginning with his private chats with President Obama, classified foreign-policy briefings and skull sessions with GOP elders and private citizens with serious expertise. Notwithstanding his robust self-confidence, the policy challenges facing Trump are daunting, and he recognizes it.

His relative inexperience requires a steep, swift learning curve — and a superlative Cabinet and personal staff.

In assembling a government, presidents must strike a balance between loyalty and competence. Each brings along his share of hacks, toadies, cronies and minor leaguers. The trick is finding harmless slots for the worst and supplementing the most able loyalists with savvy outsiders.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Bring back balanced power to Washington: Tom Coburn

President Reagan, for example, named longtime California ally Edwin Meese his presidential counselor. But he also installed James Baker, close friend and political confidant to George H.W. Bush, as White House chief of staff. The Californians were livid, but Meese’s institutional memory and personal links to Reagan, combined with Baker’s organizational prowess and ideological pragmatism, served the new president well.

To put it bluntly, each new president must surround himself with the best and the brightest, not the cream of the crap. Trump has some of both.

Rex Tillerson at State and James Mattis at Defense are first-rate talents. Some other nominees are considerably less impressive; several are ideologues, picked for their loyalty and shock value — to rattle and overhaul left-leaning agencies suspicious of Trump’s agenda. If history is a guide, some of them, even key West Wing staffers, will wash out by year’s end. On-the-job training only works for so long.

Beyond implementing his conservative, back-to-the-future vision, Trump faces another formidable task — healing a fractured, deeply divided America. This is more important than he may yet imagine.

Trump is the third divisive president in a row. To succeed, he must reverse that trend promptly. Despite vows to be the president of all and vague pledges to bind up the wounds of a raw election, his thank-you trips to states he won, reprising his raucous campaign rallies, aren’t exactly reassuring.

Like any new president, the 45th deserves every chance to succeed. His presidency is already historic; it’s uncertain whether it will lift our spirits or stoke our fears. Anyone who pretends to know is a fool, hack or partisan. Overnight is a lifetime in politics. Trump has at least 1,461 lifetimes ahead to make his case to a polarized country so desperate for change, it chose the host of The Apprentice to lead it.

Tom DeFrank is a contributing editor at National Journal and an author. He has covered the presidency since 1968 and is the senior correspondent regularly covering the White House. Follow him on Twitter @TomDeFrank

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.