Rubio’s reasoning, which has been followed by all of his colleagues in the congressional GOP, is that at the end of the day, a Trump administration will advance traditional Republican Party policy priorities. The American conservative movement has some popular ideas, but its bedrock economic policy idea of massive tax cuts for wealthy households is not popular. Why not a con man to sell it?

Trump’s policy agenda is more conventional than his speech

The agenda, in short, is tax cuts and deregulation. His administration is staffed with billionaires and Goldman Sachs alumni. What he’s proposing, as best as we can tell, is a return to George W. Bush’s economic policy overlaid with a dollop of new tariffs. Watch what Trump does, not what he says

My best guess is that Trumpian governance will end up looking more like the boilerplate conservative policy currently populating the White House website than like the feisty populism of the inaugural address. It’s possible, of course, that I’ll be wrong. Like everyone else I know who covers politics, I’ve had the chance to be wrong about a lot over the past two years. But the fact remains that to an unusual extent for a politician, what Trump says is a poor guide to what he will do.

Every politician I’ve ever heard of sometimes says things that aren’t true. No politician that I’m familiar with has such an extensive background of fundamentally misrepresenting himself as Trump does.

The watchword for covering the Trump era ought to be watch what he does, not what he says.

The Trump Show is a macabre, fascinating, appalling, thrilling spectacle. But as far as we know, its relationship to the Trump administration is tenuous and ambiguous. The show is a show. The administration will impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people.