The man won by ignoring your advice, so I suppose this sort of thing is just what he should be doing now. It's pretty much a given that he knew better than those people giving similar advice during the campaign, so why do you assume you know better than he how he should conduct himself in office? When we all end up in a gulag in the People's Republic of America, I'd rather be in the crowd that is satisfied to have gone down fighting, rather than the ones congratulating themselves on their sportsmanship and being gracious losers.

Maybe people LIKE that he's actually fighting back against the left and their media narrative.

Why? When has Obama ever done anything of the sort? Democrats keep sliding the bar further and further away from the accepted standards of cross-party courtesies, but Republicans are expected to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. Bush took the high road and got smeared for it anyway. The Clinton staffers trashed the West Wing of the White House on the way out, while the Clintons themselves tried to loot the East Wing. Bush downplayed the damage they did, graciously moved on and tried to be polite, but the GAO revealed thousands of dollars worth of damage in grafiti, drawers glued shut, sabotaged equipment, defaced computers and the like. Bush invited Ted Kennedy to a White House screening of "Thirteen Days" a movie about his brothers' handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis (which errered grotesquely on the side of hagiography), and not long after that, one of Kennedy's nieces took the occasion of some non-political occasion or memorial thing to trash the Bush administration in a fatuous speech ostensibly directed to her daughter. Clinton ran around issuing pardons and executive orders on the way out the door to inconvenience their successors as much as possible (as well as profit himself), while Bush deliberately stopped changing policies six months ahead of time to avoid creating just those kinds of headaches for whomever would follow him in office. Do you really think Obama afforded him the same courtesies? If he left the White House as neat as he found it, well, I am more willing to believe that, if only because Trump has proven less likely to sugarcoat that kind of bullshit.

All modern or recent political violence has been carried out by the left, yet there has been no cracking down by the Obama administration, merely using the IRS to investigate conservative groups, and using the Justice Department to shield leftwing voter intimidation. Some Muslim twitter troll goes around for months trashing Trump, until he finally gets attention from the Clinton campaign, who trots him out like a show dog at the convention to make ad hominem attacks against Trump (including such nonsense as waving the Constitution to imply that it supports the right of Muslims to immigrate). Trump's response was to acknowledge the heroism of the guy's son, who died in a war Clinton voted to support, and attempt to "pivot" the conversation back to national security issues. And YOU joined in with the left-wing media lynching! You repeated their arrant nonsense, without bothering to find out what was really said. You called it a political mistake.

You are part of the problem.

To be precise, Trump didn't have anything to do with the alternative facts, and that was something that passed as unnoticed as the media could make it when Bill Clinton did it. Just as they would have made the press secretary's blunder all about the individual spokesman who made the misstatement, under a Democratic administration, and let as little as possible of the embarrassment splash over onto the president. What Trump should NOT be doing is micromanaging his people to avoid such embarrassments.

You don't get to pick your battles when you are attacked. Whatever battles he picks, the media will try to use the same tactics to mischaracterize what he says, and you and your kind will nod along wisely like good little teachers' pets who agree with the crowd how fine the emperor's new wardrobe looks. Just because the only thing you could be bothered to read about was the crowd size brouhaha, does not mean it was all that Trump was doing or that it was even the main thing he was doing. It's a lot more convenient to their narrative if we ignore his rolling back TPP and taking aim at NAFTA, which actually mean something to real Americans.

The other thing is, Trump seems to be the first Republican in forever who has heard the aphorism about sticks and stones, because he actually DOES what you say he should do, and goes on about his business. What so enrages the media about his replies is that he dismisses the nonsense they try to use to obfuscate the issues. Back when he first committed suicide by ridiculing the war hero John McCain, all anyone heard was that he mocked the service of a former prisoner of war, which to a certain simple-minded segment of the veteran community, is the sin of sins. In fact, McCain made a public comment belittling his own consituency for coming out in record numbers to a Trump rally. Maybe Arizona residents who don't have so many houses that they lose track don't LIKE having Mexican criminals swarming over the border of their state. Maybe McCain resents having to pretend to care what they think every six years. But Trump staked out the immigration control position, and so they came in droves to hear what he had to say, and McCain started bitching about Trump stirring up the "crazies". So in an interview, Trump defended his own supporters, who had done nothing wrong, beyond having opinions which diverged from a cranky old rich guy, and the interviewer persisted on bringing up McCain, and insisting that Trump should not say anything against him, because he was a war hero. Finally, Trump, in exasperation said "He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you. He was a war hero because he was captured, okay? And I believe - perhaps he is a war hero, but right now, he said some very bad things about a lot of people. So what I said : John McCain, I disagree with him, that these people aren't crazy. And very, importantly, and I speak the truth, he graduated last in his calss at Annapolis. So I said - nobody knows that - I said, He graduated last, or second to last, he graduated last in his class at Annapolis." The original issue being the interviewer asking if it was approprite for Trump to have called McCain a dummy, because McCain was a war hero, spent five years as a POW. And he kept interrupting Trump with the war hero nonsense, plainly expecting Trump to shut up or apologize or something Barack Obama or Hillary Clinto or Bill Clinton would never have been expected to walk back. And if one of them had said as much about McCain, the next day there would have been articles all over the news and internet about how, while it's unfortunate they chose the phrasing, when you got right down to it, McCain's service record was not that heroic, and blah blah blah. Trump is the only Republican of national stature to have any success fighting those double standards, and you want him to play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.

If you have something substantive to say about his actual actions as President, instead of pretending that he is responsible for the media's choice of topics for criticism and minutiae on which they choose to focus, we can debate or disagree or agree, as per the content. But otherwise, all your are doing is contributing to the climate that favors the media darlings like Obama and Clinton. At least Joel & moondog have a vested interest in their obfuscations and diversionary tactics. You're like Jane Fonda and other backstabbers enemy sympathizers who undermine the military during a war.