Are we supposed to be trusting the plan or not? Well, I guess there are some misleading assumptions in that very question that’s generally repeated with more than a little bit of derision. The easy answer would be yes, but that would validate the premise.

My first issue with “trust the plan” is that there’s any set plan to be trusted that we’re privy to. If you hire a contractor to work on your house, and the contractor doesn’t tell you what they’re going to do or how much they’re going to charge you, you’re going to throw them out and find someone else. But, in the same vein, we do hire contractors to perform specific tasks in our homes, but our lay instructions are generally some sort of: “Let’s replace that, put this thing over here, and repaint this other thing.” We don’t usually know specifically how they’re going to go about their work, but we will be able to see the results, and the results are what we can judge.

So do we know what Trump is doing? Over the years, a lot of people have made a living by taking the man’s words and saying that “he actually meant this other thing when he said that.” For a while, I believed it because he would say things that were a bit outlandish and didn’t jive at all with the current zeitgeist. But at the same time, it was okay because we all believed that this other thing that he wasn’t saying was what we actually wanted. Not because we thought of it ourselves but because we were told it by people who had our best interests at heart. At this point, I believe that he’s probably telling us exactly what he’s going to do - just not how he’s going to do it. And all of those “Trump whisperers” are complaining about what he’s not doing instead of trying to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing.

And so how exactly is that trustworthy when we supposedly elected him to do the other thing that he wasn’t saying? To which I’d simply say - I no longer know what I want from my government. Over the last year, we’ve seen the massive amounts of corruption that previous administrations baked into their policy, and we’ve seen how effective well-scoped and well-managed government entities could be when executing with the correct end result in mind. At the end of the day, the old adage is true - personnel is policy. If you get the correct executive in charge, he’ll fix the problems that you didn’t know you had with your company (or country in this case.) You just have to give him the leeway to do so.

And do we believe that he has our best interests at heart? To answer that question, you really have to look at the results. The preliminary data is good, but it’s too soon to gauge. However, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt at this point because the previous path we were going down was leading to disaster.