What a refreshing and delightful contrast to the wasted, leaderless months of No. 46! 

This is an exciting and promising new start to restoring balance and energy to an ossified Oval Office that was doing the nation no good whatsoever. In fact, harm.

Probably many of us expected Trump to hit the ground running, like any new president who’s made campaign promises and wants to start fulfilling them. Instead, Trump hit the ground sprinting.

This idea of a two-term presidency interrupted by another term of an inept, feckless expert at screw-ups looks in immediate hindsight like a gift. The contrast with Trump’s energy and actions is stunning.

The explosion of energy and new policies is exciting, promising, hopeful, and, yes, even blinding like that snowstorm through the windshield. And it’s sucked up most of the oxygen and attention from the anti-Trumpers, who were so loud and prominent in 2017.

The rest of us can’t keep up, either. But we don't mind!

Democrats and media, often the same thing, have been overwhelmed and can’t keep up. Which isn’t a bad thing.

The truth, of course, is Trump is not a new president. He’s an experienced former president back at it after learning valuable lessons from the first term and with time to digest them. He’s also an impatient man of energy who endured four years of frustration, lawfare abuse, and planning time to design a return. 

And what a return!

As per custom, the Trumps and Vances waved as the Bidens lifted off in a Marine helicopter for their first unpaid vacation in four years. 

But Joe and Jill hadn’t even unfolded their beach chairs in California before the newly returned president was signing a flood of executive orders restoring a moribund presidency, a goodly dose of common sense, and undoing the worst of his predecessor’s screw-ups. 

The border was closed. The J6 pardons were signed – and none for Trump family members. The border wall was back under construction. Thousands of service volunteers who’d been fired for declining the COVID vaccine were invited to return – with full back pay.

Trump declared a national energy emergency and another on the border, enabling him to dispatch troops; in hours, they were on their way. Same for roundups of criminal illegals, some quickly loaded on outbound military transports headed south.

The new commander in chief banned DEI, declared drug cartels to be foreign terrorist organizations and added the Houthis, realigned refugee admission guidelines, withdrew from the World Health Organization, canceled security clearances for ex-intelligence officials who lied about Hunter Biden's laptop, ended work-from-home for federal employees, froze pending new federal regulations, declassified records on the Kennedy and King assassinations, restored some historical names "honoring American greatness," and one of my favorite EOs titled, "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."

Instead of taking the weekend off, as a recent president routinely did, the first couple flew to tour North Carolina’s hurricane areas still devastated four months later. There, the president had harsh words for FEMA’s snail-pace, thought out loud about turning the agency’s work over to states, and transferred $2 billion in migrant funds into storm recovery.

Then, to Los Angeles’ fire-stricken areas for an aerial tour and to hear victim stories and chide Democrat leaders for slow bureaucratic responses. At one point, Melania Trump had an animated discussion in Slovak with a resident.

At 1 a.m. after a long, trans-continental workday, Trump was still meeting with media on the tarmac. Saturday, he outlined tax plans at a Las Vegas rally, then appeared unannounced on a casino floor to loud cheers. 

Even news veterans were impressed with the volume of early work. Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren, one of my favorites for her old-fashioned professionalism, Tweeted:

Candidate Trump pledged he would do a number of things if elected to another 4 year term…but I had no idea he was going to do them all in 3 days…I thought he would spread it out over 4 years. It is hard to keep up reporting about him since the news changes every 30 seconds.

Also, personally, I was surprised by how good it felt once again to see a coherent, confident president signing documents in public while simultaneously answering random media questions with unscripted answers. As if that was the most normal interaction and not something striking after Mr. Magoo.

Notably, it was Joe Biden in 2020 who promised a return to presidential normalcy after a tumultuous Trump term. 

The Democrat then began wanton public spending that ignited historic inflation and a lengthy series of major screw-ups in policy, some of them lethal, and erratic personal behaviors in public, including sleeping during meetings and serial lying.

Now, with the 82-year-old Biden gone, it’s Trump, at 78, who ends up as the return to a political normal, presidential-style, albeit one at high speed. Perhaps not a coincidence then that Gallup just reported a surge of six points in Americans' satisfaction with their democracy's operation during the past 12 months from a record low during the Biden reign of error.

Interestingly and impressively, a disciplined, focused Trump in his first days back did not ignite ancillary controversies with off-message answers or ad-libs.

Even when reporters, seeking some controversy or conflict to make news, asked provocative questions, Trump didn’t take the bait. 

Asked about Republican senators defecting to vote against confirming his defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, Trump said: 

Look, whatever it is, it is. He’s a good man. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

That statement wisely kept the news focus on the confirmation vote, which Hegseth ended up winning for yet another Trump victory. 

Eight years ago, a less circumspect Trump would have created a volatile new story about a GOP president denouncing rogue members of his own party just days into his new presidency. 

Such missteps helped create the widespread public impression of Trump tumult, not to mention internal discord among his own party’s members whose support he is going to need on other issues going forward.

Asked about Biden pardoning numerous family members, Trump replied: “I think it was unfortunate that he did that. We won’t discuss it now.”

After a female Episcopalian minister delivered an unexpected and impolite Woke sermon to his face, Trump said, “They could do much better.”

And yet, throughout the week, Trump remained true to his authentic in-your-face self. His Inaugural Address, for example, was twice as long as in 2017. And it was both blunt and inspirational.

With the vanquished Biden and Kamala Harris sitting less than 10 feet away, Trump said:

We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while, at the same time, stumbling into a continuing catalogue of catastrophic events abroad.
 
It fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions, that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.  
 
We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders or, more importantly, its own people.

Yet in the same remarks, Trump said inspiring things like “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts” and “Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation…In America, the impossible is what we do best."

This is a different Trump, more confident, mature in the practical political sense. This time his eyes seem more on the rewards of the long run, far beyond the momentary satisfactions of punching back right now for every perceived slight.

To be sure, as of today Americans have witnessed but 0.0041 percent of Donald Trump’s final term. But as first six days go, they were each full of both excitement and fulfilled promises.