Listening to President Trump on Friday, I was reminded of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Cow Palace speech when he accepted the Republican nomination. “My God,” someone said. “He’s going to run as Goldwater!” And so it was last Friday. Unlike Goldwater, Trump won the election, but apart from that he’s going to govern as Trump.

And he didn’t waste any time. After his speech, and before the customary lunch with members of Congress, Trump sat down and signed some executive orders to undo some of President Barack Obama’s executive orders. One executive order gives the Health and Human Services Department the power to waive ObamaCare’s individual mandate requiring everyone to buy insurance.

Obama boasted that he had a pen, but Trump has an eraser.

In his speeches, Trump has taken advice from a variety of people, but this one was pure Trump, a distillation of all the things he’s been saying throughout the campaign, in formal speeches and unrehearsed moments. It was the man, himself, and the speech is about the country we’ll be living in the next four years. Or maybe eight.

When an outsider comes to Washington, as a president or congressman, the mainstream media waits expectantly for him to “grow on the job.” Which means going native, adopting all the values of DC and its insiders. What Trump told us is that that’s not going to happen with him. So no surprise outgoing CIA Director John Brennan took a parting shot at Trump by calling the president “despicable” — when in reality, of course, the despicable ones are those who claim to be “resisting” the duly elected president.

By Sunday morning, more than 200 such “resisters” had been arrested and six Capitol Police officer injured. It’s a good thing that, when Trump talked about crime in his inaugural speech, he was telling us he’s not going to follow Obama’s policy of blaming the police and praising the thugs.

Establishments don’t give up without a fight, and Trump will be opposed by most of the organs of opinion. He’ll also be opposed by its useful idiots, the radical scum I saw close up on Thursday night, when my wife and I attended the DeploraBall. They smashed windows and schemed to put harmful chemicals into the air-conditioning system, and after attacking Trump supporters were finally chased away by the police. They called themselves anti-fascists, but they looked exactly like jackbooted thugs.

But why blame them? A good many people, including Reps. Jerrold Nadler and John Lewis, have told us that Trump’s election was “illegitimate.” If that means anything, if it’s not just words, it’s a call to defend an alternative “legitimate” government against Trump and to resist his supporters, including the soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and saluted a mere pretender.

Trump’s message of personal responsibility wasn’t limited to Americans. Foreign leaders, many of who went of out their way to ridicule Trump before the election, got a wake-up on Nov. 8. They were told they’re going to be asked to bear a greater burden of national defense. Our allies are wonderful people, but in some cases they’re not carrying their weight and look less like allies than protectorates. And the new administration doesn’t think American protectorates can be justified on a cost-benefit basis.

Trump said we wouldn’t abandon NATO, but he also said we’re not going to impose our way of life on anyone. Which means that we’re going to stop conditioning our friendship and support on compliance with liberal social norms. When a country like Nigeria asks our help to fight Islamic terrorism, we’re not going to ask how they feel about abortion.

Trump said we’d seek to form new alliances, a signal to Russia of his openness to a new relationship that could transform world politics. But Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to know what the left-wing commentariat doesn’t: Trump’s no pushover. “Donald Trump is not our man,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Saturday, in a bid to, as The Washington Post explained, “limit expectations.”

Finally, Trump announced the end of crony capitalism, before an audience that included many of those most responsible for it. No wonder they looked glum. They had just been administered a bitch slap.

It’s a new year.

F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School and is the author of “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”