I’m starting to really love President Donald John Trump. First off, unlike most politicians, he is actually doing what he said he would do.

Trump said he was going to ban immigration from countries where people couldn’t be vetted until some process was worked out and that is what he has done. He has appointed a Supreme Court nominee from the list he gave to the American people when he was a candidate. And he is moving with all due speed toward building a wall and having Mexico pay for it.

I love the fact that the mainstream media are trying to make a big deal out of the fact that the US will have to front the money for the wall, as if that made his statement somehow untrue. Trump is a developer. He has built a lot of buildings, which he now owns, but I’m sure he borrowed the money to build them. It’s not like the US can’t come up with $10 billion to build the wall.

When I heard that acting Attorney General Sally Yates was telling her department not to defend Trump’s immigration ban, I said, “If I were Trump, I’d fire her right now.” Not 30 seconds later, I was reading that Trump had fired Yates and appointed someone else in her place.

Not only did he fire her, he wasn’t at all nice about it. He didn’t talk about what good work she had done, but that she had “betrayed” the administration. Trump once again is right. Yates was employed as acting attorney general and served at his pleasure. She clearly wasn’t pleasing him and he didn’t waste any time giving her the boot.

I love it. Republican politicians are terrified to do that kind of thing because they know the mainstream media will virulently attack them for it. Trump attacks the mainstream media nearly every time he speaks. So far Trump is governing just like he campaigned, doing what he thinks is right and letting the mainstream media howl and gnash their teeth. The mainstream media had better calm down or they won’t have any teeth left for the final three years of this term.

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The mainstream media and the Democrats have made a tactical error in going after Trump with both barrels on this immigration thing. First of all, he said all during his campaign that he was going to do it. The only thing that changed was the degree of the ban, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Just like when Trump starts building the wall, it shouldn’t surprise anyone.

But if the mainstream media and the Democrats pull the fire alarm with everything Trump does, they are going to lose the few Americans that they still have outside of California. They might even lose a vote or two on the left coast if they keep it up. The boy that cried wolf may be a fable, but it is very real as far as humans go. When people holler and scream that the world is ending every few minutes, after a while the rest of us tune out all that noise.

This ban is not that big a deal. Relatively few people were inconvenienced when you consider the hundreds of thousands who come to the US every day. If they had announced the ban was going to start in a week or 10 days, the mass confusion caused by all the people trying to get in under the ban would have been much worse.

People with green cards shouldn’t have had any problem, and according to the White House, everyone with a green card was allowed back in the country, as they should be. Of course there was some confusion and overreaction when the customs and immigration services started enforcing a brand new ban on travelers from seven countries.

But citizens of other countries have no constitutional right to come to the US as Democrats have screamed. It’s a crazy idea. The rights in the Constitution are for American citizens, not citizens of another country who want to come to visit, live or perhaps to kill as many Americans as possible.

Finally we have a president who will admit that these terrorist attacks occurring in Europe and America are not random acts of violence, but acts by radical Islamic terrorists who are out to destroy our culture. They are inspired by ISIS or other radical Islamic terrorist organizations, and with the freedoms we have in this country, once the terrorists are here they can do pretty much what they want until they reveal themselves by killing people.

Since former President Barack Obama would not admit that radical Islamic terrorism existed, he couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t protect the nation from a threat he said didn’t exist. Trump knows that radical Islamic terrorism does exist and is extremely dangerous, and he is going to do everything in his power stop it.

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The mainstream media are making a big mistake by going over the top on their attacks on Trump in his first two weeks in office, but the big challenge of the Trump administration is going to be to ignore them.

Trump and his people should pay no more attention to the Democrats screaming at the gates than they do to the protestors across the street in Lafayette Park who have been there since the Vietnam War. It’s true. When the War in Vietnam ended, they were having so much fun protesting that they just kept at it.

It’s more difficult for the Democrats to put together a crowd to protest these days. In the good old days it was simply a case of making one phone call to a union boss and, voila, an angry mob ready to protest anything the Democrats wanted appeared with appropriate signs. Today, with the demise of unions, it’s not quite that easy, and some protestors have to get compensation. But the Democrats can still put a crowd on the street at the drop of a hat, and it is one of the few weapons they have left, since the American people have elected a Republican president and Republican majorities to both houses of Congress.

Fortunately a crowd of protestors doesn’t do anything, unless people are convinced that the protestors represent a majority of the people. Of course, the Democrats get a tremendous amount of help from the mainstream media. The right camera angles and you can make 15 people look like 50, and the mainstream media does it all the time.

If there really is a crowd, you can see people scream and shake their fists when one of the cameras is pointed at them, and then go back to sitting around doing nothing when the camera moves away.

It doesn’t appear Trump is going to fall for this old Democratic gambit, but some of his people might. The Republican leadership in Congress falls for it hook, line and sinker every time the Democrats trot it out. You have to have a strong moral character to be able to stand your ground when you’re being told over and over how horrible your position is for your nation, your state, your party, your family and even your pet turtle. The first time you hear that you think, so what; but the 50th time it starts to sink in and it’s really difficult to stay the course.

Congressional leaders need to follow Trump’s lead and ignore the protestors and see them as what they are, a few people who are angry and a lot of people who like to protest.

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The mainstream media have been dead wrong, 100 percent wrong, about Trump from the moment he rode down the escalator in the Trump Tower and announced he was running for president. On that day the media didn’t take him seriously; the consensus was his candidacy was a joke or a publicity stunt.

Then when he started making campaign appearances and drawing huge crowds, the media said that people came to see him as a novelty but would never vote for him. The mainstream media said he would be wiped out at the first debate, which he won, as he did all the debates.

The media said he would never win a primary, wrong again. They said he would never get the Republican nomination, and many picked Gov. John Kasich, who averaged in the single digits in the primaries, as the eventual winner.

Math is not the strong suit of the mainstream media. Predicting Kasich would win the nomination was akin to predicting that Martin O’Malley was going to win the Democratic primary. But the mainstream media talked about it seriously because they couldn’t believe that Trump could win. Even after he had more than enough delegates, the mainstream media said he would be blocked at the convention.

Then, after he easily won the Republican nomination, the mainstream media agreed that Hillary Clinton was going to win, right up until Pennsylvania was declared for Trump in the early morning hours of Nov. 9.

Then there were the statements Trump made. When he went after Sen. John McCain, the mainstream media said McCain was a war hero and Trump would have to apologize. He never has. Trump horrified the mainstream media by making what they considered one politically incorrect statement after another.

So now, when the mainstream media declare the ban on immigrants from seven countries a huge mistake, why does anyone pay them any attention?

It is like Trump is speaking Greek and not a single member of the mainstream media speaks Greek, but they still report on what he said anyway. Trump is in fact speaking a different language. He is not speaking the language of the liberal elite, which includes the mainstream media. He is speaking the language of the average American.

The mainstream media should take a look at the map of the states that Trump won, pack a sleeping bag, plenty of arugula and tofu and take a field trip out to the America where most Americans live. While they are there in main street America, they need to talk to people. It will shock the members of the mainstream media, but they can communicate with these people they consider Neanderthals. After a couple of months the members of the mainstream media might even begin to understand what is going on in the country they claim to be writing about.

It is incredible. I find that the British newspapers have a much better understanding of what is going on in America than the American newspapers in New York and Washington, which are so insular they can’t see past the cities they live in and, unfortunately for the country, they control the mainstream media.

In Washington, it is called an inside-the-Beltway attitude and it has always been there, but it has never been more apparent that the country the mainstream media are writing about is not the country most Americans live in.

Washington in particular never suffered from the recession. The vast majority of jobs are government related, and while the rest of the country was suffering, Obama gave the government an additional $1 trillion to spend, and Washington prospered.

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I keep hearing different experts talk about how it is nearly impossible for the US to build a wall on the Mexican border. I wonder what these people would have said about building a transcontinental railroad with shovels, picks and mules, or what they would have said about building the Great Wall of China or, for that matter, Hadrian’s Wall.

I wonder what they would have told President Dwight D. Eisenhower about his plan to build an interstate highway system or President Teddy Roosevelt about building the Panama Canal.

It seems to me that all of the above were more difficult than simply building a wall along the Mexican border.

I even heard one so-called expert say that the fact that the federal government didn’t currently own all the land along the border, and that much of it was privately owned, would stop the federal government from building the wall. I wonder if he had ever heard of the law of eminent domain. If the government were not able to acquire private land for public purposes, there wouldn’t be a straight road in this country; roads would just stop at someone’s property line and people would have to turn around and try another route.

It is crazy to think the government wouldn’t condemn the land and buy it, but many property owners along the border would love to have the wall so that they won’t constantly have illegal immigrants crossing their property, breaking into their homes and leaving great piles of trash behind.

But let’s say the wall doubters are right and the country that nearly 50 years ago put a man on the moon and has built bridges, tunnels, canals and some of the tallest buildings in the world is stumped by the sheer engineering challenge of building a wall, so that it takes 10 years to get it constructed. Wouldn’t if be better to get started now?

Then there are wall doubters who say, why build a wall; it won’t keep everyone out. The same could be said of prisons. Why have prison walls, guard towers and concertina wire-topped fences when we know prisoners are still going to escape?

Why spend millions on Secret Service protection for the president and other top officials in the government when we know they can still get shot?

Why for that matter have speed limits when we know drivers are still going to speed, or drunk driving laws when we know drunks are still going to drive and most of them are going to reach their destination without being apprehended? Why force children to attend school when we know that some will never learn to read and write?

It’s a nonsensical argument.

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The news media is reporting things like the resignations at the State Department and the chief of Border Patrol as harmful to the Trump administration. Nothing could be better for Trump and his cabinet.

Someone who was comfortable carrying out the policies of Obama through Hillary Clinton and John Kerry could hardly be expected to be very enthusiastic about the far different policies of Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

One would hope that the State Department under Obama believed in Obama’s policies of appeasement, speaking softly and carrying no stick. Trump has an extremely different idea of America’s place in the world. For Obama, America was simply another country, no different from Fiji, Kenya, Luxemburg or Norway. America in his philosophy was not an exceptional country, but simply another country.

Trump believes that America, as the most powerful nation on earth, has more responsibility than a nation of a few million people and a military smaller than the police force in some US cities. Obama didn’t want to use America’s power; Trump plans to use American power both economically and militarily to benefit America.

The infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump officially killed but which had no chance of being passed by Congress, aligned Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam on an equal basis as far as trade goes with the US. How does that make sense? Is the US really going to benefit from the markets in Vietnam being more open to US products as much as Vietnam is going to benefit from having special access to American markets?

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People who wanted to see Obama’s birth certificate are called birthers. People who want to see Trump’s tax returns should be called returners. I would imagine that his tax returns are so complex that no one except an experienced corporate tax attorney could make any sense of them.

When I was a business owner I couldn’t understand my own returns. I turned all the information over to an accounting firm, signed where they told me to sign and sent the inch-thick packet off to the Internal Revenue Service.

Trump’s income tax return must be, what, 3, 4, 5 feet high. If he did release his returns, what would we learn – that because of the losses he has incurred he hasn’t actually had to write a check to the IRS for years? Maybe. We would certainly find that Trump’s accountants and attorneys have used every law and regulation on the books to reduce his taxes, but I’m pretty sure that given a copy of his tax returns I would learn virtually nothing, except that he is a very rich man, something I already knew.

It is actually more closely related to the Obama birth certificate than it might seem. Once Obama was elected president, what difference did it make what was on his birth certificate? He was president of the US.

The most interesting thing about that whole brouhaha was that Obama for years refused to release his birth certificate. Why? In many states a birth certificate minus the Social Security number is a public record. It’s not in Hawaii, but does anyone really care how long Obama was when he was born or his exact weight? It’s a little hard to imagine what information was on Obama’s birth certificate that for years he refused to release it when other presidential candidates released theirs with little hoopla. The longer he refused, the more convinced birthers were that there was something on his birth certificate that he didn’t want people to see.

In fact, there was nothing about his birth certificate that was unusual, which doesn’t answer the question of why he didn’t release it the first time he was asked.

Maybe Trump’s tax returns will be equally boring if they are ever released.

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I know that I will be called a racist for even mentioning this, but one of the huge differences between our current president and actually our last two presidents is that Trump is accustomed to getting up early every morning, working hard all day and going to bed late. You don’t get to be a billionaire by goofing around in the morning, playing basketball for a couple of hours, lingering over lunch and attending a two-hour meeting in the afternoon, where you act bored, and then calling it a day and going to dinner.

After dinner with his family, Obama reportedly disappeared into his private study where he read, watched sports on television and sent out some emails to staff.

President George W. Bush got started early and was reportedly in bed by 10 p.m. every night. But he was known more for his dedication to his workout schedule than his dedication to work.

Trump no doubt knows how to take some time off. He has vacation homes all over the place. But when he is at work, he not only works, he make decisions and gets things done.

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As expected, the liberals are raising Cain about the executive orders issued by Trump, saying that he hasn’t vetted them through all of the various and sundry federal agencies before issuing the orders.

One of the reasons that Trump won was that he promised not to become just another Beltway insider who won’t tie his own shoe until he’s checked with the Occupational Safety and Health Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department and the attorney general’s office to make certain that tying your own shoe isn’t considered a hazardous activity, where you might need to wear ear protection and a hazmat suit, doesn’t run the risk of harming any endangered species, doesn’t violate some union contract and cannot be considered a racist or sexist act. What if, with the tied shoe, the president steps on an endangered species?

No. The people who elected Trump elected him because he promised to act like a regular person in office and wouldn’t ask for permission before he, as the most powerful man in the free world, took actions he considers necessary.

If it is later discovered that there are actual legal problems with carrying out an executive action, and that is not the same as perceived legal issues, then the executive order can be amended.

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All those wringing their hands about the ban on travel to the US that Trump ordered act like this is the first time any country has ever issued a travel ban.

I’ve been caught in two and was inconvenienced both times. Once when I was living in Lisbon and getting ready to go to Paris, the French government decided that every foreigner entering the country had to have a visa. Americans had not been required to have a visa for years. So I had to go through the process of getting a visa, which took me a couple of days and delayed my trip. It was inconvenient and I didn’t like it, but I wanted to go to Paris so I followed the new regulations of the French government. I suppose instead I could have made a sign and marched up and down in front of the French embassy, but I didn’t see where that would help me get to Paris.

My nephew was once not allowed to enter South Africa because he didn’t have a blank page in his passport. There was plenty of room for a stamp on a number of pages, but South Africa at the time required travelers to have a blank page or they were refused entry. Fortunately for him, he was only going to South Africa for a day and was then going on to Botswana, so he spent the time between flights in the airport.

Botswana doesn’t require a blank page so he was OK once he got there.

My point is, countries make travel rules that inconvenience travelers all the time.

Trump inconvenienced some travelers, which is unfortunate, but hardly earth shattering news.

It happens. Most of the time people deal with it. The Democrats act as if this is something that has never before happened in the history of the world, which is silly.

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The new immigration policies may be a big deal in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, DC – cities that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton – but in Trump country, which is the rest of the country, the small cities and towns where most Americans live, it hasn’t created much of a stir.

Sweeping new federal policies often create problems when they are first implemented. Obamacare didn’t have a smooth launch. In that case the mainstream media kept reporting that there were a few bugs in the system, which would all be worked out and all that was needed was a little patience.

In this case, a few hundred people were stranded, forced to jump through hoops they hadn’t expected or forced to go home and wait for the US to get its policy straight. Out of the hundreds of thousands of international travelers to the US every day, it’s a tiny percentage. Bad weather, computer outages and strikes strand more people every year.

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The mainstream media are bent out of shape that Steve Bannon is being given more authority as a top advisor to Trump then they think he should have. Isn’t it amazing that when Obama was asked if there was one person he consulted with on every issue he said, yes, Valerie Jarrett. Her experience before coming to the White House was in the sometimes-shady world of real estate deals in Chicago, and in the even shadier world of Chicago politics. She had no foreign relations experience at all, except for the fact that she spent the first five years of her life in Iran and then moved to London before her family moved back to the US and Chicago.

It’s hard to believe that as a 5-year-old, Jarrett was very cognizant of foreign affairs, but according to Obama she was consulted on every decision he made. She may have some special love for the place of her birth, which might explain the agreement with Iran, which Obama signed, giving Iran everything it wanted, including plane loads of cash, while the US got nothing.

But for some reason the media weren’t troubled by Jarrett being Obama’s top advisor, yet they can’t be critical enough about Bannon.

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The mainstream media have pretty much lost their minds over the election of Trump, and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate and the fact that 33 state legislatures are controlled by Republican majorities, and it’s easy to see why.

Trump is a huge problem for the mainstream media but they can’t admit why he is such a problem. It’s not that they disagree with his policies, although they disagree with everything he stands for.

The problem for the mainstream media is that if the American people believed even half of what the mainstream media reported about Trump during the election, he would have lost in a landslide to Hillary Clinton. Of course, many in the mainstream media were predicting that Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide, evidently because they thought that some people were paying attention to what the mainstream media were saying about the presidential race, but they weren’t.

The American people didn’t believe what was being reported on the news. Take a look at all the red states on the map; in those states people completely rejected the picture the mainstream media painted of the race. They ignored what the mainstream media were saying and instead got their information straight from Trump or from conservative websites.

One thing it proved is that when people went to a Trump rally or watched Trump on television they realized that the portrait being painted by the mainstream media wasn’t accurate and they told their friends. It’s weird for a multibillionaire to run a grassroots campaign but that is what Trump did.

Here’s just one example. Trump said that all Muslims should be banned from entering the country after yet another mass killing by a radical Islamic terrorist in this country. However, he revised that remark and ended up saying that immigrants and refugees who cannot be properly vetted should not be allowed to enter the country.

To a whole host of Americans it makes sense not to grant refugee status to people if we don’t know who they are. But the mainstream media continued to report that Trump was in favor of banning all Muslim immigrants. Other politicians and candidates are allowed to revise, revisit and completely change their statements all the time. The media generally go along with the revisions, but not with Trump. Once he said something it was carved in stone and he was not allowed to revise his earlier remarks.

One big problem for the mainstream media is that Trump is so forthcoming. He would say to crowds, I said this but it turned out that won’t work, but what I’m told is we could do this. What? A candidate admitting, not that he misspoke or was misquoted, but that he was changing his opinion? It was refreshing. By comparison, when did Hillary Clinton ever admit that her statements about her homebrew email server were false? Even when the investigation proved that she had been lying, she didn’t admit it.

But the main problem that the mainstream media have is that if people don’t believe what they read or hear on the news then there is really no reason for the mainstream media to exist.