There's a phrase President-elect Donald Trump uses when he is promising greatness for America in some area or other but can't seem to capture the breadth of what he thinks he will achieve. That's when he tells his audience he will get results "like you've never seen before."
He made that outlandish prediction about caring for veterans, enforcing the Iran nuclear deal, defending America's Christian heritage, adding auto industry jobs, even "winning" in general.
Trump at heart is a creative, aggressive salesman who sees little value in restraining the message he delivers. Yet one of his pet boasts is also a true assessment of his unlikely political rise: Donald Trump will be a president like you've never seen before.
That is not an invitation to panic. It is a reminder to keep perspective after Jan. 20, when he takes office as the nation's outlier-in-chief.
He's not even in the job yet, and he's badgering American companies to preserve or build factories on U.S. soil. Presidents normally don't do this because in America the government does not set industrial policy. Ultimately, meddling in the work of CEOs is a sideshow to Trump's best chances to boost job growth: working with the Republican-controlled Congress to roll back corporate taxes as part of a larger tax reform package while paring back burdensome federal regulations.
His legacy as president may come down to how much he listens to his advisers. Trump sounded foolish in his benign take on Russia's Vladimir Putin and harsh skepticism of America's intelligence agencies. But at least two of his cabinet picks, Rex Tillerson and James Mattis, have contradicted him.
Trump is a singular figure, yet only to a point. Every president comes to the office with an ambitious agenda and only the faintest notion of what the job entails. Like every one of his predecessors, the 45th president of the United States will learn to make wise decisions, or he will fail at the job.
Editorial on 01/17/2017