From a personality standpoint, Obama is everything Trump isn’t.

He’s in control of his emotions, thick-skinned, self-aware, ingratiating, strategic and temperamentally (if not politically) consistent.

A striking quality of Obama as president is that he did his job without seeming to need to take credit for things all of the time, which kept the political price down on many of his decisions.

Obama wasn’t that way. To use a hokey sports metaphor, he did his job in the manner of an offensive lineman: The less you heard about him, the better he was probably doing. (Obama would appreciate the comparison. He will go down with Dick Nixon and George W. Bush as one the most unhealthily genuine sports fans to occupy the Oval Office).

His performance this week testified greatly to this quality. He didn’t have a lot to say about the election results, but what few lines he did…