Another Wall Street Journal article about Donald Fucktard Trump, President of the United States and Commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces

One Year in, Trump Has Broken All the Rules. Populist president has scrambled conventional wisdom on every level, with mixed policy results.

President Donald Trump’s first year in office has seen a departure from past presidential behavior on a number of fronts.

By Gerald F. Seib Jan. 18, 2018

On the second day of the new year, President Donald Trump uncorked a remarkable string of 16 tweets directly from his personal account. In them, he criticized Pakistan, threatened to take American aid away from the Palestinians, claimed personal credit for a year without commercial aviation deaths, attacked the news media and proclaimed he has a bigger “Nuclear Button” than does the leader of North Korea.

Every aspect of that Twitter chain—from the platform used, to the tone deployed, to the sensitive foreign-policy ground covered in public—marks a departure from past presidential behavior. In short, that chain is a pretty good illustration of the way Mr. Trump has changed both the presidency and what Americans have come to expect of it.

In the year since he took the oath of office, Mr. Trump has shown that he simply isn’t bound by what had been seen as the previous conventions of the role he is playing. Other presidents have sought to avoid or tamp down controversy; he is as likely to stir up or make a beeline toward controversy, seeing it as a tool in effecting change. Past presidents have tended to speak off-the-cuff sparingly and carefully; Mr. Trump does it every day on a social-media platform never before deployed this way.

Past presidents strained to show consistency in all they said and advocated, fearful that changing positions would open them to charges they are feckless or unprincipled. Mr. Trump shifts positions frequently and effortlessly—at one point standing on several sides of a tense immigration debate during a single televised discussion—and boasts that keeping foes guessing that way is an asset. “I’m a very flexible person,” he said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. He added: “I don’t know what the word permanent means.”

William Daley, who served as a cabinet secretary and White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, says simply: “He’s fundamentally changed how people, not just here but around the world, view the presidency.”

In substantive terms, if a populist is defined as someone who challenges the country’s established elites and their views in the name of “the people,” Mr. Trump is the most populist president in modern times. That has scrambled the conventional wisdom on trade, and produced unusual presidential pressure on companies and chief executive officers as they make decisions about their firms’ capital investment and hiring plans.

“He’s now changed the argument in Washington, which for the last 70 years was: Build a global world order based on uneven trade deals, create global economic interdependence and rising middle classes around the world, (and that) will keep the world at peace,” says Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump backer who served briefly as White House communications director. “The U.S. will be a benevolent superpower to a world at peace and our economy will grow. That was the paradigm. Trump wants to do all that, but even out the trade deals—make the trade deals more fair—because he believes that will benefit the American worker and the middle class.”

More than most recent presidents, he acts more like a chief executive officer of the government than its chief operating officer. Rather than present his own detailed policy proposals, he has relied on fellow Republicans in Congress to work out the details of a health plan, a tax cut and an immigration overhaul, preferring to position himself instead as a leader who retains the flexibility to close the deal rather than one who seeks to determine its precise contours.

It remains unclear how effective this new presidential style is. It has produced a historic tax cut and a broad loosening of government regulation—both of which are helping fuel a stock-market boom—as well as a significant change in the kinds of judges sitting on federal courts.

Yet the president failed to lead the way to a new health-care system or build broad support for his views on immigration, and his dealings with allies remain controversial. Even some of the president’s backers admit they feel worn down by the feel of unending turmoil. Despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to govern as almost a political independent, his polarizing style has helped prevent him from getting significant Democratic support for his initiatives, which could doom his hopes of getting a broad agreement on rebuilding America’s infrastructure.

It’s also unclear whether the changes Mr. Trump has brought to the presidency are permanent, or are unique to him as a man who, unlike any of his presidential predecessors, arrived with no prior experience in public office or the military. That status as a genuine outsider may help him pull off his style of governing, but also may mean others couldn’t do the job quite this way.

“The difference between Trump and other people is a level of authenticity that other people lack,” says Sean Spicer, who was Mr. Trump’s first White House press secretary. “You can love or hate what he does, but all of it is authentic.”

He adds, though: “Anybody who believes they are going to follow in his footsteps is sorely mistaken.”