2) The Coach is Not the Team
A president, it is true, is the iconic head of a nation. But it is his administration, not the chief executive per se, that changes the country. The nation did not just vote for Barack Obama alone, but—knowingly or not—also for the likes of Eric Holder, Ben Rhodes, Loretta Lynch, Samantha Power, John Brennan, James Clapper, Sonya Sotomayor, and Susan Rice. Obama’s picks were predictably progressive, Trump’s were unpredictably conservative and far more competent.

The administration and its agenda is not Donald J. Trump’s alone. It includes appointees such as Neil Gorsuch, Nikki Haley, John Kelly, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and dozens of others. While Trump tweets broadsides against his nemeses, the Trump Administration is undoing eight years of progressivism in a way it is hard to imagine other Republican presidents might have attempted.

In the first eight months of the Trump administration, the economy is improving, people are more confident about their economic futures, the country is becoming safer abroad with a renewed sense of deterrence, and the government is not seen as the enemy, but the enabler, of commerce. There is a certain moral quality in all that.