Sure, Donald Trump didn’t talk like any other presidential candidate, but it’s a big reason why he’s the president-elect.

After eight years of President Spock telling Americans it is not logical to get too upset about little matters like jihadist mass murder, people were ready to hear some plain talking, some well-phrased put-downs, some good-old fashioned threats. Trump’s speech carried a satisfying streak of Clint Eastwood. He practically told the outgoing president (as Eastwood said in “Gran Torino”), “Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn’t have messed with? That’s me.” To the scumbags of America and the world, he more or less said, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

But as Trump’s ally Newt Gingrich put it, there’s a Big Trump and a Little Trump. Insulting people on the campaign trail may be entertaining — Jeb Bush will carry the “low-energy” epithet to his grave — but being president is different. From now on, the president-elect needs to stop being Little Trump. Having won bigly, he can afford to speak bigly.

The man who gave that bracing victory speech early Wednesday morning at the Hilton Hotel right here on Sixth Avenue seemed to bury Little Trump: “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all of Americans, and this is so important to me,” he said. “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.”

Bang on. Trump was elected in part due to a backlash against political correctness, and while I share his distaste for straitjacketed speech becoming the norm, a chief executive who seeks to be “president for all of Americans” must speak like the president for us all.

As loony as political correctness can be, liberals have a point when they say that the original purpose was courtesy. Of course we should all extend courtesy to minorities (not excluding the minority known as straight white males), to transgender individuals, to immigrants.

If, for the president-elect’s supporters, the lesson from Tuesday’s Trumpquake is that it’s now cool to be rude in America, that’s the wrong takeaway. Winston Churchill’s dictum — “in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity” still holds. Latino voters and blacks voted against Trump in large numbers, and Hillary Clinton carried women voters by 12 points. Trump should be gracious toward all, especially those who worked to defeat him.

President Obama had an unfortunate tendency to inject himself into disputes that had nothing to do with him, to signal he was on the correct side in the culture wars. It isn’t hard to imagine President Trump going even further and spraying kerosene on the fire of the cultural controversies that will certainly occur during his presidency by insulting or belittling his ideological opponents. In future he should keep his thoughts on Rosie O’Donnell and Lena Dunham to himself.

Trump need not completely abandon his hard-hitting rhetorical riffing, though: Unlike law-abiding Americans, terrorists and foreign adversaries don’t deserve our president’s respect. Obama’s utterly foolhardy decision to signal weakness overseas even after he became president via what was commonly called his “apology tour” emboldened America’s haters and played a part in the increasing instability in the mideast during his tenure.

Even Obama’s smart moves, such as eliminating bad actors overseas via drone strikes, were reduced in effectiveness by his failure to accompany them with muscular rhetoric. Fundamentalist jihadists should be only too aware that drones are lurking overhead every minute of the day; President-elect Trump figures to be much more willing to provide reminders of this. His blunt verbal style could be a great American weapon, a way to make our enemies fear us again.