President Trump is unlike any previous president in many ways. But one in particular stands out: He's a plain talker. This singular trait makes him both revered and reviled.
The advantage of being a plain talker is that the president talks exactly the same in public as he does in private; there's never any guessing games. The disadvantage is that he doesn’t sound presidential.
Would I like a president who sounds more presidential? Absolutely. But it is what it is, so there's no point in belaboring it. Yet that's exactly what we do.
Most of the conversations surrounding President Trump aren't policy-based, but personality-based. We keep rehashing what we already know. The man says what he thinks, and he thinks what he says. He's unpolished. And yet he gets the job done, just as he said he would.
If you ask those who want the president out of office (or heck, off the planet), you won't find much talk about policy. That would be hard, since Trump has accomplished so much in one year, and the things he has accomplished haven't been all that partisan. What you will find is a visceral reaction to the president's mere existence. It is his style, his look, his speech, and his delivery people hate.
Well, half the people. The other half love the very thing the other half hates. That in itself isn't unusual; America has always been divided. But the divide is typically policy based. The Left and the Right will either love or hate a president based on his beliefs and his ideas for how government should be run. With President Trump, the chasm is almost solely based on whether or not you like Trump as a human being.
That's new. People may have needled past presidents for their respective flaws, but their mental health was not usually called into question. Granted, no president has ever talked the way Trump does. But that's my point. It isn't what President Trump does that his haters focus on. It's the things he says and the way he says them.
And that's not a battle worth fighting. The president ran his campaign on being a regular Joe. An extremely rich and successful one, but still. President Trump is never going to be anything other than what he is. We don't have to like it, but we can't change it. And it's a waste of time to try.
Perhaps if his haters focused more on substance than style, if they talked policy rather than personality, Americans could have a serious debate about the issues.
The truth is, President Trump is more bark than bite. Those of us who aren't filled with hate and who prefer plain talkers to pretty talkers can see this as clear as day.
America just needs to relax.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, Fox News contributor, and trustee of Leading Women for Shared Parenting. Her fifth book, "The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage: HOW LOVE WORKS," was published in February.
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