On the opinion side of the house, which I oversee, we are entitled to our opinions. But here too it is important to maintain a thoughtful perspective.

We on The Post’s editorial page spent the better part of the past two years warning the country not to elect Donald Trump. We said he was unfit by temperament and experience, misguided on many issues and a potential danger to democratic norms.

Now we find ourselves in the unusual position of hoping to be proved wrong.

The opening of the Trump administration has not been encouraging, to put it mildly. But that doesn’t change our mission.

We must distinguish between words and deeds. We must sort the good from the bad. And, in a political culture inclined to view every adverse action as the onset of a potential apocalypse, we must distinguish the merely regrettable from the genuinely harmful, and the genuinely harmful from the irreversibly damaging.