THE REALITY – AT 11:30 A.M. ET:  We may not want to face it, but more and more I'm hearing people on our side saying that they're tired of President Trump.  They say that they applaud his ideas, his spectacular record of accomplishment, his speaking real truth to power, but that they can't take his personality.  They want a president they can be proud of.

I understand.  There are many times I feel the same way.  Why doesn't he talk about policy and just shut up about everything else, especially his petty feuds? 

It's a serious dilemma.  We're facing an opposition party where truth is never a requirement and where the presidential bench is on a junior-high level.  And yet we often yearn for someone who can carry the Trump message with the Reagan touch.

Rich Lowry, who has struggled, as we have, to support the president on his important journey, feels the same way.  We have the right message and a badly flawed messenger, and it is causing anguish.  From the New York Post: 

President Trump is showing it’s possible to preside over a period of peace and prosperity, and still be notably unpopular…

…In much of the recent polling, he’s dipped back under 40 percent after a steady, monthslong run of being at about 43 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average.

He hasn’t done this with any spectacular misstep. What Trump has done, predictably, week after week, is mess up the easy stuff.

It’s not hard — through gritted teeth and insincerely, if necessary — to say the appropriate things about an American hero upon his passing.

It’s not hard to limit your tweets on the morning of September 11, for just a few hours, to the topic of the anniversary of the attacks and leave commentary on a recorded cable TV show for some other time.

It’s not hard to avoid attacking your own attorney general in public, repeatedly and in an escalating fashion meant to inflict the greatest possible humiliation.

It’s not hard to avoid throwing around the word “TREASON” loosely or to muse about changing the libel laws to exact legislative retribution on your critics.

Granted, it’s harder to build a cohesive White House team, but it ought to be easy to exclude volatile C-list stars from your old reality show and generate enough coherence to stem nonstop self-serving, backbiting leaks (let alone attacks on you in anonymous op-eds)…

It’s not as though any one thing — the Stormy Daniels affair, the Cohen plea deal and the Manafort conviction, the security-clearance controversy, the Omarosa book, the anonymous op-ed, the Woodward book — is as consequential as it’s portrayed in any given news cycle, but one damn thing after another adds up.

Trump has an amazing ability, through the force of his personality and his instinct for the mediagenic provocations, to blot out the sun. He wouldn’t be president without this quality. It’s just that, given the positive state of the country, less blotting and more sun are called for….

…An economic boom is a terrible thing to waste.

COMMENT:  Very well said.  Look, we're not goin' anywhere.  The president is pursuing good policies, and he's spoken truths that needed to be spoken.  But, like Nixon, many people, including his own supporters, simply dislike him and, like Nixon,  he faces an irrationally hostile press. 

There is no obvious solution, as Trump refuses to quiet down and grow into the office.  But 2020 is just around the corner, and I'd hate to see all the progress being made destroyed by the president's own personality.  His ideas deserve better.

September 15,  2018