The week represented a pair of huge policy gambles that inevitably will define the president’s first term in office — that is, if he carries through with them. Trump’s new tariffs, if truly implemented, risk a global trade war that many economists say would produce no winners and many losers. His sudden willingness to meet face-to-face with the leader of North Korea represents a step no other sitting president has been willing to take, a high-stakes act of diplomacy by a president who claims to be a dealmaker like no other.

This is the president that Trump promised he would be when he campaigned for the office in 2015 and 2016. He pledged not to be predictable or conventional. He demonstrated that he has no fixed ideology or convictions — although hostility to long-standing U.S. trade policy might be the one area of consistency in a record otherwise dotted with contradictions and reversals. He listened only occasionally to his top advisers, relying instead on his own instinct and self-confidence.