The many ways to view Donald Trump

There are many facets to the guy, and a lot of inconsistencies, but a thread of continuity does appear when you look at a few of these facets in tendem.

His presence at this year's Davos summit is big news, given that he's the first US president to attend since Clinton. His speech was a fairly disciplined, coherent and comprehensive statement of how he sees the US engaging the world stage on his watch. It was decisively America First, but he tempered the rough edges of that concept by saying that the US was open for business and that foreign firms would find it a great environment for placing operations.

He had to indulge in some bragging as he conveyed this, as is his wont. He also had to indulge his signature touchiness regarding the news media.

He stuck by his resolve to pull out of the climate nonsense - a definite plus in LITD's estimation.

The portion devoted to North Korea and Iran was terse but resolute. The goal on the Korean peninsula remains complete denuclearization.

Melania's absence was conspicuous, and the timing of her bow-out been duly noted in myriad media outlets. Still, with no substantiation, it's risky to flatly declare that it's a response to the Stormy Daniels revelation.

Before he left, the Very Stable Genius ruffled the feathers of a significant portion of his base with this move:

 President Donald Trump is proposing giving 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship in exchange for $25 billion for his long-promised wall and a host of other strict immigration reforms, according to a White House framework proposed Thursday.

In what the White House framed as a "dramatic concession" and "compromise," Trump would accept a path to citizenship not just for the roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants were covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program when it was ended. But the proposal would also cover those undocumented immigrants who meet the DACA criteria but did not sign up and even more who would be newly eligible under the proposal's timeframe requirements -- giving legal status and a pathway to citizenship to about 1.8 million people.

The fact that his proposal also includes measures to end chain migration, as well as measures to enforce current laws, isn't doing a great deal to ameliorate his base. Some are just plain outraged, and some are trying to see a bright side, noting that DACA people wouldn't get citizenship, hence the ability to vote, for ten years, and that an influx of new voters is all Democrats care about. Some evangelicals are pleased with it.

The LITD take is that polling data shows the American public to be capable of some nuance on the subject of immigration. They want to see both the legal and illegal kind slowed down as the nations gets its demographic and economic bearings, but they also don't want to abruptly rip people who have only known life in America from their circumstances. A path to citizenship for actual DACA people and no other kind of illegal aliens is humane and doable. So is enforcement of eVerify. The wall? Way down the scale in terms of importance.

DJT did have some noteworthy facts on his side when he did his bragging. The economic buoyancy resulting from the tax-reform bill is extending beyond bonuses and raises. There's a new upsurge in capital-equipment acquisition at a lot of companies.

But this business about tariffs on washing machines and solar panels is a glaring minus. Tariffs distort the market price of any good or service, open the possibility of trade war, and wind up raising the prices of the goods in question. This is what I mean by inconsistent.

Then there's the revelation that he considered firing Mueller in June of last year, and was talked out of it by White House counsel Don McGahn and some others. DJT cited some conflicts of interest on Mueller's part, but was convinced that the resulting firestorm would be counterproductive in the extreme.

The person of Donald Trump points up something conservatives have to reiterate often in this age of tribalism and gotcha: It is possible to acknowledge two or more things as fact that might not appear at first glance to be congruous.

Donald Trump is in many ways a loathsome human being. He has no ideological rudder, he lacks a filter between his brain and mouth, he's not much of a reader, he's thin-skinned and narcissistic, and he doesn't seem too repentant about his sybaritic past. On the other hand, America is dealing with the rest of the world from a position of strength it hasn't enjoyed in over a decade.

In fact, those two facets of who he is impact each other. I'm quite sure the good policy-level moves come from his asking those in his inner circle, when he's deliberating how to proceed on some issue, if a particular choice will make him look like a winner. The key, then, is for the kind of people so advising him to be of the bent that will steer him toward actually winning courses of action.