But Trump, at his heart, is a businessman.
He’s spent his life doing deals, often taking extreme starting positions – whether he’s buying buildings or golf courses, or haggling over a TV show salary - to secure leverage and then negotiating back to a more reasonable place.
He’s been adopting the exact same strategy in this presidential race – to great effect.
The presidency is just another deal to Trump, albeit the biggest of his life.
To win the White House, he has to first win the Republican nomination, and he’s calculated that the best way to do that is to hammer away with tough-sounding messages on hot button Conservative issues like Islamic terrorism, immigration and abortion.
It’s undeniably made him sound at times both racist and sexist, neither of which I have ever heard him be in the ten years we’ve been friends.
But I suspect everything he’s been saying is negotiable, from his Mexican wall to short term Muslim ban.