Do you suppose President Trump will, on Day One, start disassembling Obama's pet policies (thus throwing millions of Americans off of healthcare, reneging on an international agreement we had with our allies over Iran, and so on).
Will he tell us the week after his inauguration exactly how the IRS is progressing on that audit and how soon it will be over so he can release his tax returns? Will he immediately get on the phone to Mexico and demand enough pesos to build that big beautiful wall he's been dreaming about? Will he lock the gates at the borders and chase off everyone who speaks Spanish or Arabic? Will he immediately start spending day after day in various courtrooms, suing all those women who lied about him and his penchant for groping, as he said he would, while doing his part on alternate days to make sure Hillary rots in prison?
Hey, come on, media. Hold his feet to the fire. Either he follows through diligently on all these campaign promises that got his followers so stoked, or he lets it all fade into the gathering fog, therefore painting himself as the lying opportunist many of us suspected he was, a scammer who was just blowing smoke to get elected.
My prediction? Left to his own devices (that is, unless someone presses him relentlessly), I think he will go utterly silent on all of those things. We won't hear another word about walls, or women, Obamacare or crooked Hillary. Because, it's like this. Trump enthusiasts don't really care about his campaign promises, and he knows it. They only care to the extent that they found his verbalization and theatrics to be entertaining while they lasted.
It was all hyperbole. We knew it. Trump knew it. And his tribesmen knew it; but they didn't give it a second thought--because these are guys who live in a world of hyperbole.
Ever listen to working dudes at a bar? Or at the ballgame? Or in the locker room? Or at the backyard barbecue? We speak in overblown, nonsensical nonsense constantly. It's hilarious stuff and it keeps us entertained. We despise this politician or that religion! And everything we love is always the best in history! And the things we hate, the most disastrous ever! And, by God, we are gonna whup the ass of anyone who is un-American enough to disagree! Yup, that is called "guy talk".
Trump has become fluent in it--a lingo loaded with exaggerated stream-of-consciousness rhetoric that sounds to the ear of the working man exactly the way he and his buddies themselves talk and think. Sure, they know it is nearly all B.S. But that's okay; it keeps them laughing and keeps their anger level up to an acceptable level.
Saying that stuff on the stump served him well, but President-elect Donald Trump knows full well that his people no longer care one way or the other about any of those things now. And didn't really take it to the bank even back then. They were entertained for a few months, and that's all that matters. It was Apprentice-II, the Sequel...and that season has ended.
So, no, don't look for any tax returns or Mexican walls or lawsuits against gropees anytime soon---or anytime in the next four years for that matter. Trump will quietly let those matters die on the vine. Unless, of course, someone in the media (or his opposition camp) is concerned enough to keep asking him about it every day, day after day after day.
They should. Because the single reason he got elected was the entertainment value of those wild claims and threats. And, if we let him slide on them, he gets off scott-free with fifteen months of lying and deceiving the American voters--a flim-flam tactic that got him the biggest prize of his business career: the coveted office of Leader of the Free World.
