Trump is right, but the government has long been enormous. What is different is that Trump ended up in the Oval Office having expressed little interest in how the government worked over the preceding decades of his life, and barely more during the presidential campaign. While he demonstrated a prodigious, intuitive grasp of electoral politics, policy held little interest for him; and because, despite that intuitive grasp, he did not expect to win the election, he did little to prepare himself.

During the campaign, Trump boasted that if elected he could cram and catch up, and now that process is in action. Some of what Trump is learning is purely factual—such as the size of the government, or his new understanding of how the Export-Import Bank functions. According to Peter Baker, Trump only asked how surveillance worked after he lobbed a wholly unsubstantiated claim of wiretapping at Barack Obama. Discussing his decision not to brand China a currency manipulator, as he had promised during the campaign, he told the AP, “But President Xi [Jinping], from the time I took office, he has not, they have not been currency manipulators.” This is true—but China quit devaluing its currency in 2014, long before Trump entered office.

But many of his revelations concern the human dimension of his job. His central new insight seems to be that in the world of politics, the personal is far more important than he realized. This might be a surprise from a man often described (sometimes pejoratively, but often not) as “transactional,” but as Trump notes, “Here, everything, pretty much everything you do in government, involves heart, whereas in business, most things don't involve heart … In fact, in business you're actually better off without it.”

One good example of how this manifests itself is the decision to strike Syria with missile strikes after a chemical attack by the Assad government. His quick change of position—from being staunchly against intervention against Assad to launching airstrikes—was dizzying, but seemed to be largely an emotional reaction to the horror of images from the strike. Yet despite tough talk about the military, he had apparently never grappled with one reality of being commander in chief up until then:

When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I'm saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, 79 [sic] missiles. This is death that's involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that's involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area—you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away—and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet .... every decision is much harder than you'd normally make.

Even where human life is not involved, basic human emotions are. Discussing the question of Chinese currency manipulation, Trump acknowledged that even if Beijing were still devaluing, he might be unable to pressure the government too forcefully