WASHINGTON—As much of the world alternated between gasping at this week’s White House news and taking mental health breaks from it, Bobby Steele was soaking it in, gleeful.

Steele supported Donald Trump from the beginning, and the new president was doing exactly what he had promised.

“He don’t talk about getting things done. He gets ’em done,” said Steele, 53, a grocery store manager in northwest Florida. “He told you on the campaign trail what he was going to do, and day one, he started doing it.”

A week into his tenure, Trump has managed to validate his supporters’ biggest hopes while also confirming his critics’ worst fears.

For voters who sought a conservative-nationalist shock to the liberal-multilateralist order, he has done nothing to worry them. For voters who worried that he might blow up the planet in a petty rage, he has done nothing to reassure them.

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Trump has acted swiftly on several of his key campaign promises, even some of the ones his allies had suggested were mere strategic metaphors. Through a blitz of executive orders on immigration, Muslims, trade and health care, he has made clear that he intends to govern as he ran.

And through a stream of needless lies, outlandish boasts and impulsive fury-tweets, he has made clear that he intends to serve as commander-in-chief while behaving as unsteadily as he did when he was running.

The first polls of his tenure reflect what is shaping up to be a historically divisive early presidency. In one of them, by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, Trump had an 81-per-cent approval rating among Republicans and a 4-per-cent approval rating among Democrats.

Here are 12 things we learned from Donald Trump’s first week in office:

The incredible, exhausting Trump Show

Just before Trump took office, senior adviser Kellyanne Conway made this prediction: “In one week’s time, you’re definitely going to feel this is President Trump’s government.”

She was right, both about substance and style. Trump is making sweeping changes to Barack Obama policies while also burying Obama’s orderly “no drama” era in a blizzard of intentional and accidental diversions. This is the presidency as 24-hour reality show, a spectacle that insists on being watched even when you know you should just go for a soothing walk, and there is simply too much happening for the media to communicate, let alone the casual news consumer to comprehend.

“It is just not possible for a person with a life and a job outside of politics to understand what is happening in politics right now,” former Obama speech writer Jon Lovett wrote on Twitter.

Trump wasn’t just posturing

During and right after the campaign, some of Trump’s most prominent backers argued that some of his policies, like his wall on the Mexican border and his border ban on Muslims, were supposed to be taken as symbols, not actual policy.

Trump, though, is actually trying to deliver. He has ordered the construction of a wall, though it won’t be as tall as he claimed and though many specifics remain unresolved. Though he hasn’t imposed a full ban on Muslim entry, he is restricting the movement of even permanent residents and Canadian dual citizens hailing from seven Muslim-majority countries.

This is not to say he has been wholly consistent with his campaign rhetoric. After denouncing the influence of Goldman Sachs, he has hired at least five people from the Wall Street firm. After saying he would take action on a bunch of major issues on “day one,” he has done nothing on most of them through week one. But the week should be the end of the silly debate about whether to take Trump literally. The answer is absolutely.

The fringe is now running the world

It was far from the most significant part of Trump’s executive action on immigration, but it was probably the most telling: an order to publish a “comprehensive” weekly list of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in so-called sanctuary cities where local leaders try to protect them from deportation.

Breitbart, the formerly fringe-right website led until last year by Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, has a page devoted to “black crime.” Now the White House is planning to have a page devoted to the crimes of largely Hispanic undocumented people. This is an administration less interested in unity than in the grievances of its base.

The president is detached from facts

When Trump started rambling again about how millions of illegal voters cost him a victory in the popular vote, many Democrats saw a pretext for Republicans to eventually make it harder for minorities to vote.

Perhaps. But possibly even more startling is this: by all indications, Trump really believes this nonsense. The president is a conspiracy theorist, susceptible to elaborate idiocy from crackpots.

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The president is preoccupied with popularity

The headlines were straight out of a satire about an unhinged strongman: “President Trump boasts of biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning won Super Bowl,” “Trump Calls Inauguration Crowd ‘Massive,’ Says God Shielded Event From Rain,” “Trump pressured Park Service to find proof for his claims about inauguration crowd.” They were all accurate. Even after becoming the most powerful person in the world, even after earning one of the most improbable upset wins of all time, a man long fixated on exacting revenge for perceived disrespect is still obsessed with showing the world how beloved he is.

The president is going to profit

Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort doubled its membership fee. The head of Trump Hotels said he is planning a major expansion in U.S. cities. A business lobby group suddenly shifted a meeting to Trump’s Vancouver hotel.

Ethics experts say Trump needs to sell his company to avoid conflicts of interest. Because he is merely transferring “control” to his sons, retaining ownership, he will make a lot of money off of his position.

Unorthodox style, conventional policy

Part of Trump’s appeal to many voters was his indifference to traditional ideology. On some issues — Russia, free trade, infrastructure spending — he still deviates from the standard Republican line. On numerous important files, though, he has suggested he will govern as a conventional conservative — giving tax cuts to the rich, cutting funding to Planned Parenthood, slashing regulations on business. His unorthodox rhetoric can be wrongly confused for unorthodox governing.

TV is key

Big corporations spend millions trying to get access to the president and his team. The most effective thing they can do, though, might be to get invited on a morning or evening show. Trump — “who does not read books,” the New York Times casually noted this week — has continued to watch TV religiously, and he sometimes acts immediately on what he hears. Minutes after a Fox News guest spoke of “carnage” in Chicago, Trump used the same word and threatened to send in “the feds.”

Canada is flying under the radar

It’s the nightmare of Canadian diplomats in Washington: an American government simultaneously focused on border threats and the downside of free trade. So far, though, the Trump-era discussion has ignored us. As noted by The Canadian Press, Trump’s Border Security executive action contained 19 references to the Mexican border and zero to the Canadian border.

They have found a useful enemy

Trump is at his political best when he has an enemy to rail against. In the absence of a campaign opponent, he has settled on one of the few American entities less popular than he is: the media. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Bannon told the New York Times, adding: “The media here is the opposition party.” That he was clearly intending to bait the media into a reaction does not make the words less chilling.

Facts and science are under threat

America elected a man who came to political prominence promoting an obvious lie about Obama. Unsurprisingly, his administration began with a deluge of obvious lies. America elected a man who believes the fact of global warming is a hoax invented by China. Unsurprisingly, his administration has moved immediately to muzzle environmental scientists, refusing to let them release even routine data to the public without Trump appointees reviewing it first.

There is an opposition

To the dismay of some of the party base, elected Democrats have not seemed to figure out how or when to try to fight Trump. But the base itself is alive and energized, if frequently despondent. The massive post-inauguration women’s marches served as a reminder that a unified Republican government does not mean Trump will be unopposed.

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