Thomas Donlan of Barron’s ponders potential changes a real outsider could make as the next U.S. president.

Trump is a rich guy, but his political virtue is that he’s low class and not of the governing class. His ability to lead a city full of professional politicians cannot be measured by his ability to build skyscrapers and casinos with other people’s money.

Nothing in his experience is like herding political cats. He does have experience giving political money, and he has said that he understands very well what that’s really about. But spending taxed and borrowed funds to obtain legislative support is just one aspect of his new job.

Harry Truman reportedly said of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the last president to enter the White House without political experience, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

Trump knows how to say “You’re fired” on television, but he can’t fire world leaders or members of Congress or federal judges and justices. Congress also has limited the presidential power to dismiss some officials.

Richard E. Neustadt said in a classic book on the presidency, “Powers are no guarantee of power; clerkship is no guarantee of leadership….Despite his status, he does not get action without argument. Presidential power is the power to persuade.”

It will be interesting to see if Trump can persuade the people and its Congress to approve his programs. We also don’t know what his programs will be, nor how hard he will work to push them through Congress.

The easy one is a gazillion-dollar investment in infrastructure, which is popular and has no drawback other than the likelihood of wasteful spending and higher deficits.

As several analysts have asserted in their critiques of Trump’s economic plan, its Keynesian deficits could provide the short-term stimulus that Democrats are always looking for, snapping the country out of secular stagnation. Democrats have already signaled their eagerness to work with the new president on more spending and borrowing.

Many people who supported Trump as an iconoclast brushed aside his actual plans to build an anti-Mexican wall, to send home 11 million illegal immigrants, to end subsidized health insurance for some 20 million people, to tear up trade agreements, to cut taxes on corporations and rich individuals, and so on.

Trumpians often were heard telling incredulous reporters that they took some of these plans as emblematic of his being on their side—more symbolic than real. But how will they like expulsion of real members of their communities—their employees and the employees of businesses they patronize?

Voters may have blamed Democrats for the recent rise in Obamacare premiums; whom will they blame if Trump and the Republicans make health insurance more expensive and less available?