What We Know

What we know from the presidential election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and what he'll bring to the office and do as President is both everything and nothing.

First the election. Trump won with less popular votes than Clinton, 47.5% of voters for him but 47.6% of voters for her. She won the national vote but lost the Electoral College, namely a few key states (FL, MI, PA, OH), which put Trump over the 270 minimum to win.

This is because only 55.6% of eligible voters voted, meaning neither won more than about a quarter of all eligible voters nationwide. That's not a sweeping victory for Trump or a catastrophic loss for Clinton. Only a lot of voters chose neither candidate by not voting.

While the media and democrats will do all the postmortems on the failure of the Clinton campaign, which boils down to a two factors, she is better at being President than running for President and Trump is the complete opposite.

The Clinton campaign didn't have a clear strategy and worse didn't have a plan to encourage voters to her side. She is more than experienced and competent to be President, but just didn't demonstrate the personality to capture voter enthusiasm.

They also didn't have a good slogan or nutshell presentation to describe her views. The slogan, "Stronger together", doesn't work to invite people in and raise enthusiasm, such as "We're stronger together", would be to invite voters to her candidacy.

Anyway, that's left to the pundits and political operatives to sort out the failures to work. She should have trounced Trump in the major states and didn't get her message out well enough nor get enough voters excited to vote.

That's what we know. What we don't know is Trump, someone the media has clearly described as unfit to be President, who will now have to prove he is fit. We know all his business experience, good and bad, is completely useless and irrelevant for being President.

Being President means you have to govern the administrative branch of government, and work with Congress to get your plans into law. There's much a President can do through executive action but most requires Congress, and Trump didn't help himself attacking them in the campaign.

What we know will be the government is completely run by republicans (yes, even the Supreme Court is and will be conservative with more republican appointed justices than democratic ones). And there is little the democrats can do to stop them except the filibuster rule in the Senate.

What we don't know is what they'll achieve, which for now is speculation, but with a some good measure of certainty of their intentions. That is Congress. Trump is the unknown for he's favored some democratic views on Medicare, Social Security, infrastructure spending, etc.

And that's what Trump has to do, not convince people he can do the job, it's too late for that, but actually govern as President. The skills it takes has been clearly shown, and not shown, by past presidents, Trump should learn.

And that's the complete unknown. His personality doesn't fit someone to be President for the longterm, something he's demonstrated and the media has shown. The reality of being President will test him to show if he has the capability (doubtful to many, even some republicans) to stay the course in politics.

That's the reservations people have about him. He seems to like quick decisions, easy answers, and short periods to finish. World events are none of that, either requiring years of building trust with foreign leaders and governments, or working in places with no good solutions involving many nations and much diplomacy.

We saw what happened to the Bush (or Bush-Cheney) administration there with their failures to get things right, let alone finished. Does Trump, with his staff and cabinet, have the necessary people and tools? Consensus to date says no.

The reports to date suggest he'll surround himself with people who are "Yes" types to compliment his ego or who will agree to get their goals done through his approval. This was Bush's failure and probably will be Trump's failure too.

This is because his personality, his ego, controls his thinking. Everything is about him and his name. He's shown he has problems with facts, the truth, complex issues, criticism, opposing views, and so on down the line of character qualities.

Those are not the character qualities you want in a president. He's also shown as short attention span on issues, admitting he doesn't read much in depth, less than Bush who only read summaries and briefs on issues to make quick decisions, often wrong.

Trump is more the extreme. He's admitted having an assistant print all the news stories about him everyday for him to read. That's his focus, himself, his name and his image. A president focuses on others and the issues. The "we" and not the "I".

He's also said how smart he is, smarter than even the best experts, on issues he's almost, if not completely, ignorant about. He assumes what he's gleaned from TV and other sources works for him, but leaves no doubt to the obviousness of his arrogance and ignorance.

And that's the big unknown, what will happen starting the day after the inauguration when everything is presented to him in daily briefings and as events happen. He's not shown the stamina, dedication, discipline, intelligence or interest for it.

Which leaves the question, will he just be a show president, who delegates everything to others and takes the credit for successes and blames others for the failures. If so, it will be a short presidency for him when everyone sees he's the emperor with no clothes.