Recent reports have Donald Trump and his family splitting their time between Washington and New York, with him mostly in Washington and them mostly in New York. His children, who were his main business partners and confidants, have a restricted interaction with him due to conflict of interest concerns.

Like most salesmen, Trump revels in the conquest, not the execution. He achieved his goal of vanquishing his Republican rivals in the primaries and Hillary Clinton in the general election. But now he has has settled into the more mundane task of governing, conquering legalese and minutia.

Sure he will be thrilled to get some of his main campaign promises passed. But even that will be a slog, assuming he can get them through congress. Opponents will challenge him in court. States will throw up roadblocks. His glass will be half full, not overflowing.

When he solicited John Kasich to be vice president, Trump made it clear that he was only interested in the celebrity half of the presidency and not very keen on the day to day responsibilities. Has anything really changed? How long until being cut off from his family and playing a part that does not fit his nature wears him down?

Will he delegate everything to Mike Pence, his vice president? Or will he find an excuse to walk away when it isn’t any fun anymore and he has nothing left to prove, like after helping the Republicans stay in power in the 2018 midterm elections?

A half life in physics is the time required for something to fall to half its value.The half life of Trumps presidential aspirations could be sooner than anyone expects.

The press and the Democrats are going to have a hard time getting Donald Trump’s supporters all hot and bothered about his ethics violations. He and his people are being accused left and right of abusing their positions to enhance the Trump brand and its commercial success. To which his supporters emphatically reply, “well, duh”.

As they see it, at least Trump is transparent about the whole thing in contrast to other politicians, who profess to be ethically pure but are caught all the time in nepotism, pat my back / wink wink deals and worse. Does anybody really trust politicians?

Trump’s supporters put him in the White House to shake things up. While he does this, they want him to keep telling it like it is, tweeting and saying provocative things. None of them care if he makes a little money along the way. At least he is open about it. And it is a drop in the bucket compared to what they know others (big business, etc.) are ripping the government off for.

Trump’s only vulnerability is from is staff and appointees. He knows where the line is between an conflict his supporters will accept and one they won’t. It remains to be seen whether the rest of his team understands this as well as he does.

The travel ban affecting people from seven mostly Muslim countries that Donald Trump implemented the other day was brilliant politics. Even though he has never been a politician, Trump is outmaneuvering the Washington establishment with ease.

Think of all of the benefits to Trump of the executive order that implemented the ban:

• Trump did it himself and did not have to rely on Congress. He shows that he can get things done without them
• It was implemented during his first 10 days in office, showing that he can act fast
• It probably won’t stand up in court, so he can reap the political gain from the ban without having to deal with any long term consequences, economic or otherwise
• The turmoil around the ban distracts attention from anything else the Trump administration or Congress is doing
• The ban has no effect on 99.99% of Americans. In fact, most would probably support closer scrutiny of people coming from those countries, just because they are paranoid about terrorism
• The ban energized the left into protesting.
  • Trump will belittle the protests, showing that he can beat them
  • The average American will not relate to the protests for reasons described above, showing that the protesters don’t really represent them
  • At some point, the left, the media and the American people will get protest fatigue. These protests just move us closer to that point

The Washington Post instituted a Pinocchio-based fact checker. Trump may be a Pinocchio, but he’s also doing a masterful job of pulling Washington’s strings right now.

The media continues to have a hard time with Donald Trump. Like a magician doing card tricks, he manipulates the media into focusing on trivia instead of the more important thing he is doing. His usual m.o. is to tweet something. Tweets are like catnip to the media – they can’t resist.

For example, last week he tweeted about voter fraud which dominated the morning news. Instead of focusing on the executive order of the previous day regarding regulatory streamlining, the media spent its time trying to prove a negative (there is no voter fraud), which is, of course, impossible. Even if one could prove it, it doesn’t matter as it won’t change anything in the US. However, freezing and rolling back EPA and Agriculture regulation can change quite a bit.

Eventually the media will (hopefully) figure this out and focus on the right things. After all, they are supposed to be professional skeptics. But for the time being, Donald the Illusionist is making them look like rubes.

Donald Trump has no issue calling his opponents liars. First it was Lyin’ Ted Cruz, but after he defeated Cruz in the primaries he transferred the moniker to Lyin’ Hillary Clinton. Give Trump credit – he states it very plainly and clearly.

Washington’s media and political class, however, cannot seem to bring themselves to use the word “lie”. Instead, they use alternatives like:

• Factually incorrect
• Misstatement
• Untrue
• Falsehood
• Fabrication

Why not just call it a lie? All of these euphemisms make a lie sounds like not such a bad thing. It signals that the speaker does not have the guts to tell the unvarnished truth about a lie. Trump’s supporters, and in fact everyone, have very good ‘gutless’ detectors. Until the establishment media and politicians can get over their aversion to using the L word, they will be at a disadvantage.

In recent history, there were two times that the press and politicians called the president a flat out liar, and not just a misstater of the facts. One was when Richard Nixon denied having anything to do with the Watergate break in. The other was when Bill Clinton denied having an extramarital affair. In both cases, the president was impeached.

If everyone starts using the L word about Trump, he could be in for a rough ride.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump had an important epiphany and verbalized it at a rally:

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?  (1/23/16)”

His point was that once a voter decided to support him, it would take something truly massive to get them to change their minds about that support.

He was correct.

And he still is.

This is not just because he is so good at getting his message to his supporters. It is also because his opponents are so frightfully bad at communicating with Trump’s supporters.

On paper, there are plenty of issues with Trump. But none of his opponents, Republican or Democrat, have figured out a way to get these across to his core supporters. For one thing, they have not figured out the new media rules (e.g., how to bypass the press and use Twitter instead).

They are also not willing to be as crass as he is. But as Trump’s supporters know, crass is another word for telling it like it is. They are tired of politicians that speak in politically correct B.S.  They don’t, why should their politicians? It is similar to George W. Bush: many people did not agree with his positions, but they admired his ability to take a position and stick with it. They may not agree with all of Trump’s positions, but they admire his street fighter approach to standing up for them.

Until one of Trump’s opponents is willing to engage him in a street fight, Trump will hold onto his supporters through thick and thin.Who will that be? So far, the only possibility from the 2106 campaign season is Bernie Sanders, and it is not clear that he wants that fight.

Donald Trump got quite a bit of political mileage over the corruption and incompetence of the politicians in Washington DC. Real or imagined, it hit a nerve with the public and his Drain The Swamp Twitter hashtag proved very popular. Even after he was elected, he used it to shame the Republican congress into not gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics.

Trump himself is Teflon. He has been associated with swampy behavior, but nothing sticks to him (so far). It will be interesting to see if that holds true for his team. His cabinet appointees, especially those from the private sector, may find that the Washington microscope is particularly good at ferreting out slimy, swampy actions. And since Trump is invincible, there will be all the more incentive for the press, etc. to go after his surrogates.

It will be ironic if Trumps opponents are successful in turning a 2.0 version of Drain The Swamp against him.