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Yet his casual rollbacks on his biggest problems bring remarkably little backlash from his supporters. As The Atlantic's Salena Zito memorably wrote while covering Trump's campaign, "the press takes him literally, but not seriously; "his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

Maybe he'll keep the most popular parts of Obamacare, he said after meeting with President Obama. Maybe he won't try to round up and deport all of the undocumented immigrants in the country. Maybe just the violent criminals. Maybe the wall he wants to build along the Mexican border with be part wall, "part fence."

But so what if he casually rolls back on his promises as if he never made them? When he makes such claims, "the press takes him literally, but not seriously," wrote The Atlantic's Salena Zito while covering Trump; "his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

Trump's media games took on a new significance after he resumed his pre-election habit of waging useless Twitter wars, this time with the New York cast of the hit Broadway musical "Hamilton."

Trump was steamed that Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by the crowd and (politely) called out from the stage at the Friday night show.

"The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated," Trump tweeted, "should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior."

Never mind that Pence later said that he wasn't offended at all. (And never mind that "Hamilton" is in no way overrated.) But Trump's little Twitter feud was perfectly timed to distract the world from his $25 million settlement of three class-action civil lawsuits brought against Trump and his "university," the controversial learning annex which was not really a university, the New York attorney general, said.

Was Trump's anti-"Hamilton" Twitter tirade, then, a deliberate diversion from a far more damaging news story? If anything pokes holes in Trump's new-found image as a champion of ordinary folks, the Trump University scam does it. That's an important story but, alas, less tantalizing to home audiences than Trump's Twitter jab at those supposedly snooty liberal actors on Broadway.

That's normal behavior for Trump. That's why he needs to be "abnormalized," in my view. His success at hiding scandals behind gossipy controversies needs to be the exception, not the rule.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.