Earlier this year, The New York Times allowed me to ask its readers, “Is there nothing nice you can say about the man who, after all, is our president?” The nearly 2,000 emailed responses we got in the first month were generally tongue-in-cheek, along the lines of a joke: In his awfulness, he has united the nation in disliking him. This would be a better joke if it were true.

Another large category was people who praised him ironically for breaking some campaign promise, such as saying he would deport the Dreamers. These contributions usually ended with the word “yet” or its equivalent. Mr. Trump is praised for having resisted (so far) the urge to fire Robert Mueller. And for having, until recently, “stopped threatening to prosecute Hillary Clinton.” And because he has “dropped (at least for the moment) his claim that his Trump Tower phones were tapped.”

An alarming number of readers demanded that their subscriptions be canceled because this one pro-Trump article appeared in a daily sea of antagonism to him. Should it really count as pro-Trump to say, well, he’s done this one good thing among all the bad things? And, of course, one reader noted that Mr. Trump had revived the newspaper industry by being so distasteful.

Similarly, a writer praised the president for encouraging “a diverse group of Americans to look beyond our own, often narrow agendas and come together to fight this administration’s attempts to institutionalize injustice at every turn.” I suppose, if you were Donald Trump, you could read that as a compliment.

A few participants were overtaken by events. “I did like the bombing of the Syrian airfield,” one writer cheerily conceded. She said this reflected the president’s willingness to “draw a line.” Unfortunately, Mr. Trump (with Vladimir Putin’s help) erased that line in the weeks between when the writer wrote us and now.

A suspicious number of people wrote in to praise President Trump’s choice of James Mattis as defense secretary. The Mattis fan club is either very large or very well organized. Which is good because the Defense Department could use one that is both.

I couldn’t tell if some entries were joking or not. “Before Trump,” one person wrote, somewhat mysteriously, “I didn’t know anything about the awesomeness of Maxine Waters.” Maxine Waters has been awesome for many years, but is she supposed to be happy that opposing President Trump has given her a higher profile? Maybe so.