Karen Tumulty: Donald Trump is master of distraction but we must judge him on what he does, not what he says

Donald Trump’s inaugural address was remarkably free of anything fresh. But as it twisted through familiar territory, it served as a reminder of something fundamental about the nation’s 45th and now 47th president: watch what he does, and don’t get distracted — or lulled — by what he says.

The speech, which was nearly twice as long as the one he gave at his first inauguration, opened with a grim portrait of a country in crisis, though featured no language quite as vivid as the evocation of “American carnage” eight years ago.

Trump closed with an uplifting promise, more typical of what we have heard from other presidents, of “a nation like no other, full of compassion, courage and exceptionalism”.

But the part that mattered was the one in the middle, in which he previewed the roughly 200 executive actions, memorandums and proclamations that he was poised to sign on his first day in office.

That amount of executive action right out of the gate appears to be unprecedented in modern times. But while the outlines of what he plans to do are becoming clearer, the details remain scarce, and the legal obstacles could be formidable.

In his inaugural address, Trump said he would institute measures to crack down on illegal migration with a vigour “nobody has ever seen before.”

One of his 10 immigration-related executive orders, an administration official told The Post, would reinterpret the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

It would end “birthright citizenship,” which recognises as US citizens the children who are born in the United States to people who lack legal status, and would no doubt trigger a monumental challenge in the courts.

Also constitutionally and morally questionable: Trump’s vow to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority allowing a president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation.

That law is best known for its role in the shameful internment of American residents of Japanese descent during World War II.

With regard to the environment, Trump would bring an end to what the White House in a statement referred to as “climate extremism.”

He would ease restrictions on oil and gas production and revoke what he described in the speech as Biden’s “electric vehicle mandate,” requiring two-thirds of all new vehicles sold in the United States by 2032 to be zero-emission.

And as he did in his first term, Trump would withdraw the US from the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, an international effort to slow global warming.

Some of his planned actions — renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” for instance — are silly, old bones thrown to the MAGA base.

Among those is one cited in a White House statement: “The President will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology.”

Still others are contradictory. In his inaugural address, Trump doubled down on his threat to take back the Panama Canal.

But his pre-inauguration comments that this might include military force would seem to go against his promise in the speech to “stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable.” Sooner or later, he will have to choose.

The central vow on which he was elected is more complicated than all of these: a promise to put the economy on sound footing and bring down prices.

“I will direct all members of my Cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices,” Trump said on Monday.

Americans should hold him to that and expect solid results in short order. It is his good fortune that Joe Biden left him an economic landscape in which most of the major indicators have been headed in the right direction.

But economists say the steep tariffs that Trump says he intends to slap on foreign countries could send prices skyrocketing again.

Trump is a master of distraction, a virtuoso of flooding the zone with bluster and illusion. One of the biggest mistakes that his political opponents — and, yes, the news media, too — made during Trump’s first term was to follow him down every rhetorical rabbit hole and explode whenever he posted something outrageous on social media.

This time around, let’s try something different. Let’s keep an eye on what he actually does and measure him by what his policies yield.