I met Donald Trump in the newsroom of The Bergen Record in spring of 1986. Unlike his rude, bombastic public image of today, he was polite and considerate.

I met Hillary Clinton in a hospital in 1993. And unlike her stiff, unsmiling public image, she was warm, vivacious and funny.

Both of these people were better known behind the scenes as deal makers who could work with the other side of the aisle. Why they come off so poorly in public is a mystery.

The Donald is now The President of the United States. I agree with Bernie Sanders on many domestic issues but I'm not hoping that Trump will be a miserable failure because then America will be a miserable failure too. His election was part of the same historic rejection of politics as usual as Bernie rise in the polls.

I am hoping that he can put away his Twitter account, stop fighting with the press and quit settling scores and get down to making some good deals for the country. That involves give and take and compromise, something for which the Republicans in Congress are not known.

There will be a national mid-term election in 2018 and party in power in the White House typically loses seats in Congress. The GOP has a slim 4 vote majority in a legislative body where it usually takes a 20 vote supermajority to pass anything major. If the Republicans succeed in ramming policies down the throats of Democrats after an election where the Trump actually lost the popular vote for the White House by four million votes, there will be a hellacious backlash, just as there was when the Democrats used their slim majority to ram down controversial policies down the Republicans throats right after Barack Obama was elected.

It could take a year for major policy decisions to be fully implemented, so there is scant time for private beefs, partisan and vendettas.

I am not too hopeful that cooler heads with prevail.