In just one year, Donald Trump has quite literally revolutionized American politics. As everyone knows, he made history on Nov. 8, 2016, by winning election to the highest office in the land without ever holding public office before, or being a former general in the armed forces. This should have been an indication to the political observers and sundry members of the policy and media “elite” that this will be a presidency like none other.

The year since his inauguration has proven the case. There are easily measured historic markers from the first 12 months President Trump Donald John TrumpBiden leads Trump by 36 points nationally among Latinos: poll Trump dismisses climate change role in fires, says Newsom needs to manage forest better Jimmy Kimmel hits Trump for rallies while hosting Emmy Awards MORE has appointed more federal judges than any of his 44 predecessors. He has presided over a positive economic tsunami that has broken every significant record, the last occurring during the anniversary of his inauguration, which saw the Dow Industrials rally 500 points in the shortest time since the index was created. He has also presided over a drop in unemployment to levels not seen in a generation, but most importantly, in historical terms, the lowest unemployment amongst African Americans since systematic record-keeping began.

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To these mathematically discrete measures of historic significance, we can add the more intangible measures of just how much Trump has broken existing political patterns and revolutionized the American presidency. Ever since the earliest threats to our republic, such as the Barbary pirates more than two centuries ago, through to our 20th century enemies in Europe, Asia and beyond, we have never seen a commander-in-chief arrive in the Oval Office and dispatch a primary threat to the nation within just months of his predecessor telling the world that said foe would take decades to vanquish. Yet, this is exactly what President Trump has done with ISIS.

President Obama had told us, all not too long ago, that ISIS represented a generational threat to America. Yet, within just months of his inauguration, President Trump was able to declare the physical Caliphate of the Islamic State destroyed and the ISIS capitals of Mosul and Raqqa liberated. (For details on how he and Defense Secretary James Mattis James Norman MattisBiden courts veterans amid fallout from Trump military controversies Trump says he wanted to take out Syria's Assad but Mattis opposed it Gary Cohn: 'I haven't made up my mind' on vote for president in November MORE achieved this, see my congressional testimony from last week). The war with the global jihadist movement is not over, but the 180-degree nature of this strategic reversal is unprecedented.

There are many other ways the former reality TV star and real estate mogul has made history or simply ignored and thus negated established expectations, models and Washington ways of doing business for the better, but the one that will have the longest and most significant repercussions for how politics is done in America has to do with the media.

President Trump has a complex relationship with the press. The majority of the “mainstream” hates him. This is clear from the studies of how he has been covered over the last year. And if the statistics on ridiculously biased levels of negative coverage were not enough, the surreal experience of watching last week’s briefing on the president’s health with Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson tells you all you need to know about what matters the most to the White House press corps.

Yet, for all the light and heat generated between the president and what he likes to refer as the purveyors of “fake news,” and the latter’s obsessions with stories (and often rumors) that would have ground most other administrations to a halt, President Trump has still managed to dominate the strategic communications “battlefield.”

Whether it’s a 6 a.m. tweet that shapes media reportage for days, or an impromptu presser in which President Trump takes questions without prompter or notes for almost an hour, this is a commander-in-chief who doesn’t hide from his detractors and who now has almost 50 million followers on Twitter alone. The reality thus created — or, rather, the version of “media reality” so generated — will not be something that future presidents will be able to dismiss.

A new kind of president, a new kind of politics?

What does all of the above mean for the future? When we moved into the White House on the morning of Jan. 21, 2017, the number of true “Trump loyalists” who had been part of the campaign and ended up in senior positions was very small. As a result of all the positions that had to be filled, individuals who had had nothing to do with the “Make America Great Again” agenda were let into the building.

The rise in their influence is the main reason that I resigned my position inside the White House to support the MAGA agenda outside of the building. As a result of this dynamic, many of those who voted for the rank outsider to become president have become increasingly concerned with the influence of the “swamp” inside the West Wing, not just on Capitol Hill, or the broader interagency government.

In some cases the concern is unwarranted, with President Trump doggedly sticking to his campaign promises, for example, recognizing Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel. In others, the “base” remains clearly worried, as with the question of any kind of amnesty for those here illegally under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals system. So what will year two of the Trump presidency bring?

The key parameters are set. Physical progress on the wall must be made. Failure to do so would be perhaps the only way the president could lose his most ardent supporters. Likewise, the disaster that is ObamaCare must be deconstructed and replaced beyond simply the recent torpedoing of the individual mandate.

But the largest test for the president in the next 12 months will come in a less obvious, more intangible area. Monica Crowley once described Trump as an “attitudinal” as opposed to an ideological candidate. And she was right. But attitude only goes so far in politics. Sooner or later, one has to produce a coherent set of beliefs around which to explain and build future policies.

In 2016, the outsider Donald Trump acted as a massive icebreaking ship which crashed through the permanently frozen sea of establishment Washington politics and stifling political correctness. Now, 2018 is the year for putting real substance into the concept of “Trumpism,” differentiating it from the Reaganism of the 1980s, or the “Compassionate Conservatism” of the Bush era.

If the right fails to define what “America First” actually means beyond individual presidential actions, the ice will reform and knit itself back together in the wake of the “Great Disrupter.” This substantive conceptual work can be done. But it must happen this year.