Greg Kesich: Set aside what president-elect says and focus on what he does

I made it through Thanksgiving with the in-laws without screaming at anybody, after reading all the advice on how to keep the peace at the holiday table (“Try other topics: Men like to talk about football, women like to talk about family”).

Nobody lost their tempers this year, and everybody is still talking to each other.

My social media relations, however, have taken a hit. Like millions of Americans, I had to cut off an online relationship as a result of the election.

I’m going to my Twitter account to unfollow Donald Trump.

I know, it’s fun to have a president who tweets. Just last weekend he went off on the election results, claiming that he won not only the Electoral College (“By a landslide!”) but also the popular vote, if you discount the millions of fraudulent votes that he claimed he had to overcome.

Now that’s funny: A politician sowing doubt about the integrity of an election that he won!

It’s hard to resist, but I’m going to try. From now on, I’m going to try to pay as little attention as possible to what he says, and try to keep focused on what he does.

Why? Because he says a lot of things that aren’t true. Whether he’s lying, confused or just changes his mind a lot, it doesn’t matter.

He’s for building a wall one day and a fence the next. Hillary Clinton should be locked up, or she’s suffered enough, depending on what kind of mood you catch him in. If we get outraged every time he says something outrageous, we won’t be doing much else.

But while it doesn’t really matter what he says, what he does is huge.

For instance, the day he was firing off tweet after tweet about “crooked votes for crooked Hillary,” The New York Times had a typically boring story in which it talked to multiple sources about the president-elect’s business dealings in a half-dozen countries around the world. It described how his adult children are courting state-owned businesses as local partners and applying for permits and tax breaks – that is, when they are not sitting in on transition team meetings at Trump Tower or schmoozing with foreign heads of state.

People are doing things right now that could matter a great deal, and we might miss it if we are too wound up about who should apologize to whom after that performance of “Hamilton.”

I have another early New Year’s resolution for the Trump era: I’m trying to stay away from calling people “hypocrites.”

This is not going to be easy. We are about to see another Republican president and Congress run up the deficit with new spending and tax cuts. It’s really easy to feel superior when you’ve seen them pontificate about how irresponsible it is to make our grandchildren pay this grievous debt for the past eight years.

But there’s plenty of hypocrisy out there. For instance, I’ve suddenly become aware that Edward Snowden revealed three years ago that everyone’s every phone call, movement, text message, email, Google search and Instagram post is collected and saved in an archive, from which a record can be assembled later by investigators.

Constant surveillance didn’t seem so bad when Barack Obama was in charge, but now, I don’t know.

Hypocrite? I guess, but I’m beginning to think hypocrisy might be what saves us.

The way people will change sides on issues so easily tells me that we are not as ideological as we think we are. Our positions are probably determined as much by our friends, our moods and who we trust as on careful analysis of the evidence. A little “hypocritical” flexibility should be welcomed.

There are a lot of people who argue that we should be having a big “conversation” so that we can understand each other better. But maybe we should listen to each other a little less, especially when we are yelling, and focus on what people are actually doing.

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