Trump in Two Tones

President Trump can go both ways. On February 24, he delivered a wild-and-woolly speech brimming with populist anger to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Four days later, he addressed a joint session of Congress in statesmanlike fashion and called for national unity and bipartisanship.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Trump is politically bipolar. He shows very different sides of his political thinking depending on which adviser influences him. Adviser Steve Bannon’s unfettered populism shaped the CPAC speech and even a bit of the talk to Congress. His daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, the moderate couple, had a bigger role in his milder words to the joint session.

But something gets left out here: Trump himself. It's as if he's a president with no mind of his own and few serious ideas. He's putty in the hands of his advisers. This has been said of earlier presidents—Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, for instance.

The notion of presidents as brainless vessels is a hardy perennial of the press. But it's rarely true. And it's especially not true in Trump's case. What the media and much of the political community have yet to recognize is that Trump shares many of the traits of a conventional politician. A loud, overbearing, and crass one, yes, but still one who calculates his moves in the way politicians do.

It may be a heterodox idea, but Trump actually has strong ideas of his own. They involve more than the quality of his speeches as performance art. If Trump is a genius for having scoped out a path to the White House that no one else saw, it makes sense that he'd have substantive ideas as well. And he does. We know the list. It starts with immigration, trade, and terrorism.