Which Trump will emerge as president?

EDITOR'S NOTE: An image of the Herblock cartoon mentioned in Ruth Marcus' Sunday column is available for your use and can be downloaded from https://s3.amazonaws.com/news-service/static/Herblock+Shave.jpeg. Please credit the cartoon as: "A 1968 Herblock Cartoon © The Herb Block Foundation."

WASHINGTON -- Herblock, the legendary Washington Post cartoonist, spent decades depicting Richard Nixon as a sinister figure with a five o'clock shadow. The day after the 1968 election, Herblock sat down to draw the cartoonist's office as a barbershop, a paper taped to the wall: "This shop gives to every new president of the United States a free shave." Signed, "H. Block, proprietor."

Herblock later explained his decision to employ a healing razor: "In spite of his past, it seemed to me that an incoming president, particularly at a time of national divisions and crisis, was entitled to his chance to lead."

So is President-elect Donald Trump.

His clean shave does not mandate our empty mind. Not about the repulsive things Trump has said and done, nor about his manifest unfitness and unpreparedness for office. Nor does it signify naive optimism about Trump's willingness -- or even his capacity -- to change. As Herblock discovered, which surely did not surprise him, "it turned out to be the same old Nixon."

But democracy and the constitutional order compel respect for the outcome. Patriotism demands hope that a better Trump can and will emerge, alongside the faith that a resilient system of checks and balances will operate to constrain his worst instincts.

"I hope he fails," Rush Limbaugh said of Barack Obama before the inauguration in 2009, and it felt, as I listened to Limbaugh's words, shocking. Yes, I hope Trump fails to implement the dangerous policies he has endorsed -- his abandonment of international alliances; his cruel plan for mass deportations; his dangerous rhetoric about locking up opponents, opening up libel laws, launching trade wars.

But to hope that he fails as president is to bet against the country. As President Obama said Wednesday from the White House, "we are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country."

Yet we have to hold out the possibility for a kinder, gentler Trump, even if it is fanciful to expect a 70-year-old man to suddenly display a capacity for humility, empathy and tolerance that has been lacking not only during this ugly campaign but throughout his life.

A clean shave should not be a free one. The price for Trump must be, first, a recognition of reality: that a majority of voters did not support him - indeed, that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Second, Trump as president-elect, and as president, must demonstrate some comprehension of constitutional norms.

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