Donald Trump likes to emphasize how everything about him is big. His plane. His buildings. His hands.

But time and again during his presidential campaign and his transition to the White House, he has shown a smallness of focus, a willingness to punch down that suggests a deep lack of discipline. The last example came Wednesday night when Trump took to Twitter — natch — to attack a local union president in Indiana:

Why? Why would the soon-to-be president of the United States use his massive social media following to attack someone in Chuck Jones whom almost no one had heard of before Wednesday night?

The answer, as almost always with Trump, is (a) because he wanted to, and (b) there is no one around him to stop him from doing what he wants to do. Trump values unpredictability, and he lives it every day. He can be big and even magnanimous (his new friendship with President Barack Obama, his consideration of Mitt Romney for secretary of state) in one minute and incredibly small (attacking a union guy, making fun of a disabled reporter) in the next. The high and the low are both Trump; he swings between the two day by day and even hour by hour or minute by minute.

That big Trump/small Trump phenomenon was on striking display in April in an interview with then-Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren. Here’s the clip:

That’s a remarkable thing to watch.

In one breath, Trump insists: “Tone does matter. My tone’s going to change as soon as I finish the victory. Being presidential matters.”

In, literally, the next breath, he totally contradicts that idea: “If somebody hits me. I have to hit them back. I have to.”

And then this: “I want to win. I will be so presidential you won’t believe it.”

Watching that clip is like watching the literal re-enactment of the angel on one shoulder, devil on the other cartoon shtick. Trump wants to be presidential. People he trusts tell him to be presidential. But he cannot resist hitting back when hit. It’s just not him. And it never will be.

In any sort of normal political climate, Trump’s willingness to punch down — or inability to resist punching down — would be a major issue for him as he prepares to ascend to the presidency. After all, most people don’t want the leader of the free world getting into Twitter scuffles with a random organized-labor guy, right?

And yet, Trump won the 2016 presidential race by doing exactly that: swinging wildly between high and low, big and small — often with no warning. It’s hard to look at what happened in the course of this campaign and conclude that Trump’s style didn’t work for him.

The lingering question is whether Americans who were fine with a presidential candidate punching down but will be much less fine with their president doing the same. We’ll start finding out that answer in a month or so.

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