If my gentle readers will bear with me for a bit, I’d like to offer some insight regarding something I believe a lot of folks are missing concerning the strategies and processes being implemented by President Donald Trump.

For the record, and as regular readers of this column already know, I’ve never been a Donald Trump fan or devotee. I grew up in New York, where Trump was a phenom and media icon long before “The Apprentice,” and I always took him to be a savvy opportunist who knew how to work the media – sort of a white Al Sharpton who actually employed people. I’ve referred to Trump as a gerbil and a carny barker reminiscent of P.T. Barnum.

However, as I also stated earlier in this space, it’s quite possible for someone of this demeanor to love his country and want the best for its people. I would never presume to know what is in the heart of any other individual; however, in most cases the intention of a person can be gleaned from his actions, and here I am going to employ the empirical evidence to make my case.

Since Mr. Trump became our president, he has evidenced a brutal honesty in a number of areas, one being in roundly excoriating the establishment press for their subversion. This is something we conservative and libertarian types have been screaming from the rooftops for years, yet I saw relatively little support for this or even gratified satisfaction among many who should have been gratified by the president’s deportment in this area.

Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an Obama-era ankle-grab trade deal conservatives rightly saw as an international overlay of NAFTA, with all of the American job losses and sovereignty compromises attendant to our prospective participation in that deal.

This week, Trump addressed a group of CEOs at a White House-sponsored town hall and announced massive governmental regulatory cuts and $1 trillion in infrastructure spending. Many of Trump’s regulatory cuts are calculated to favor small business rather than massive, entrenched conglomerates. Trump is also planning to end U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund. As I’ve said, I believe that the U.N. building ought to be bulldozed into New York’s East River and its delegates expelled from our soil, but that’s another story. In any case, the pertinent take-away here has to do with Trump’s measures curtailing that criminal and hypocritical organization’s undue influence on American policy and influence in the international arena.

Last week when the proposed awful, awful Republican replacement to Obamacare fell apart and Trump indicated that he would be willing to work with Democrats to craft a more equitable legislative solution to the Affordable Health Care Act, there was marked outfreakage among conservatives. The president’s popularity suffered, and some observers intoned that this validated their earlier concerns that Trump is nothing but a progressive crony capitalist prostitute like so many others who insincerely professed the concerns he had run on during his campaign.

So, in case you’ve not yet figured this out (because there’s every possibility you’re at least as smart as I am if not smarter), let me tell you something about Donald Trump, remembering that I have never been an ardent fan.

Donald Trump is a world-class talent with regard to what he does, and that’s business. He has a natural ability in this regard, and he is practiced. This role has required insight and an ability to gauge the motivations, capacity and reactions of other individuals of innumerable persuasions around the world, and he has been doing this for decades. One cannot look at his massive personal success and evaluate this talent lightly. He is not only singularly talented, but he has a passion for the dynamics of human interaction and for winning. He is literally a Michael Jordan of the business world. He has brought that talent into the White House, and he intends to apply that talent to his new job. This is not difficult to understand, but the deeper aspects of its implications have the potential to be somewhat elusive.

I do not know if Trump will wind up being a Michael Jordan among presidents as he is in business, but my admonition here is that we not be deceived or frightened when he presses others’ buttons in a manner in which we may not initially comprehend, whether they be U.S. congressmen, business magnates, or foreign potentates. Look at the results garnered from these negotiations, because negotiations is what they all are. That is the modality in which Donald Trump operates.

Article reposted with permission from Erik Rush