A whimper from The Donald

It sure didn’t take The Donald long to become a “regular” politician. After all the talk during the campaign about what he was going to do when he became president, Donald Trump has started out with somewhat of a whimper. First of all, he sits down with President Obama and has a nice chit chat. This after questioning just about everything about the president during the campaign. He opens up dialogue with China, whom he criticized sharply during the campaign. He started out his acceptance speech by saying Hillary Clinton was a great worker on behalf of her country, and deserved a lot of praise. This after he consistently tore her apart at every opportunity.

If nothing else, Trump’s early days as President-elect make me more worried than if he had carried on the same rhetoric he spouted during the campaign. Is this a reversal of form? Which is frightening because it makes him look like he has no idea where he’s going. Is he changing tactics, and in essence telling us all the things he espoused during the campaign were just a joke? Donald Trump was elected because he hit some buttons that trigged white middle-class Americans who wanted change. They didn’t want the same old, same old. The way Trump is starting out, same old, same old is what they’re going to get.

Let me make it clear that I am not in favour of anything Trump said during the election campaign about building walls, keeping the Mexicans and Muslims out of the U.S., and much of the economic flipping and flopping he did. As Jimmy Pattison said last week, a protectionist president is not good for Canada. But when Trump criticizes China during the campaign, and now opens dialogue, when he talks about how Hillary was so bad and he would be investigating her, and now says she has done a great job for her country, I wonder whether there’s any truth to anything he has said or is saying. Or is it all just some wild rhetoric that is part of some long con that he is running full of misdirection and mystery?

I guess the question I’m asking today is – will the real Donald Trump please stand up and be recognized? Right now we’re not really sure who is going to be the man to take the oath of office on January 20. The man with all the bluster during the campaign, or the new Donald who has shown up in the past week. We’ll probably have to wait a bit to find out for sure.