Our improvising president

In The New York Times:

President Trump delivered his “fire and fury” threat to North Korea on Tuesday with arms folded, jaw set and eyes flitting on what appeared to be a single page of talking points set before him on the conference table at his New Jersey golf resort.

The piece of paper, as it turned out, was a fact sheet on the opioid crisis he had come to talk about, and his ominous warning to Pyongyang was entirely improvised, according to several people with direct knowledge of what unfolded. . .  .

Among those taken by surprise . . . was John F. Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who has just taken over as White House chief of staff and has been with the president at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., for his working vacation.

I didn’t think there was much reason to expect that Kelly’s presence would temper Trump. I keep thinking of Maya Angelou’s famous observation: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

[The red is mine. Feel free to imagine an appropriate adverb between entirely and improvised, as I have.]