MOMENTOUS. Unprecedented. A pinch-me political occasion. The meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un was all of that, but it was remarkable in another way. This was the moment when Donald Trump confirmed his place as the most honest president in American history.

Not honest in the sense that he is a man of high moral principles and integrity, but honest as in upfront. He is able to be this way because, to borrow the title of the current Rolling Stones tour, he has “no filter”.

A perfect illustration of this came in the press conference after the signing. Maybe it was the lack of sleep; perhaps he was a little giddy after pulling off a meeting critics said would never happen. Either way, here was the US president as we have never seen him before. This was late night, post-Vegas show Trump, tie metaphorically loosened, shooting the breeze, telling the folks how it was.

He was explaining how he had succeeded in bringing North Korea to the table where other presidents had failed. “They have great beaches,” he said of the country. “You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean. I said, ‘Boy, look at that beach. Wouldn’t that make a great condo behind it? You know, I said, instead of doing that you could have the best hotels in the world right now. Think of it from a real estate perspective’.”

There we have it. There is no such thing as a Trump doctrine in American foreign policy. There is, though, a condo creed. Winston Churchill said we would fight them on the beaches; Donald Trump says we will not fight them because they have great beaches on which we can build cool stuff and make money. No filter. Politics reduced to a simple game of divvying up the spoils.

His apparent success in Singapore has added to a growing feeling in some quarters that perhaps there is more to this president than meets the eye. There is even a new political game in town called “What would Donald do?” The chief player to date has been Boris Johnson. In his address to a Conservative Way Forward meeting, the Foreign Secretary harrumphed: “Imagine Trump doing Brexit. He'd go in bloody hard... There'd be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he'd gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere.”

It is not only Mr Johnson giving the president credit. The Guardian’s George Monbiot yesterday praised him for standing up to the rest of the G7 and not nodding through an update of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He did temper his admiration by calling Mr Trump “an odious demagogue” and remarking that it was a measure of how badly elites had corrupted liberal democracy that the likes of the president were seen as champions of the people, but still, a compliment is a compliment.

Chief among the Trump cheerleaders was Justin Webb, a presenter on the BBC’s Today programme. In the Mail yesterday he listed the advantages of having a businessman as president. “Business folk don’t do deals to save the world. They do deals to further their interests and those of their shareholders. And Trump is all business all the time. He is willing to do or say whatever it takes.” Contrasting success in Singapore with Robert De Niro shouting “**** Trump” at the Tony Awards, Mr Webb concluded: “The know-it-alls can scoff and sneer, as know-it-alls do. But for the time being, Trump is winning.”

Other variations on the "maybe Trump is not so bad after all"argument have it that he may be madness on stilts but beneath the chaos there is a method at work. Who else could have convinced Kim Jong-un that America had elected a man crazy enough to hit the red button? Perhaps Mr Trump is simply lucky, or just bold enough.

He also keeps his promises. He promised to stand up for the American workers who had seen their jobs go abroad, so he brought in tariffs that have the rest of the G7 crying foul. He promised to put more money into people’s pockets, so he engineered a trillion dollar tax cut. He promised economic success. Look at the Dow. If you are an American of a certain political stripe, the US seems to be doing pretty great again. In a Gallup survey for the week just gone, the president’s approval rating among Republicans was an astonishing 90%.

If that holds, anyone expecting a “blue wave” of Democrats to wash Republicans out of Congress in November’s mid-term elections had better check their assumptions. With the Democrats increasingly split into two camps, activists versus the party establishment, the Republicans could keep control of Congress, see off moves to impeach the president, and hold the line until 2020 when either Mr Trump, by then 74, will be re-elected or replaced.

Should we revisit our opinion on Mr Trump? Has he taken Bill Clinton's old title of the Comeback Kid? No. At one time it was fashionable to compare the 45th US president to Chance, the Peter Sellers character in the film Being There (showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival on June 30 if you missed it). Chance was a modest, unassuming chap, but clever folk in Washington mistook his simplicity for wisdom and hailed him as a genius. But the system being the system, nothing too bad happened and the world kept turning. Phew.

Trump is not Chance the gardener. Chance never got started in the gardening game with a loan from his father, for one. Nor is he the new Ronald Reagan, pilloried first, respected later. Ronald Reagan was clever enough to gather great minds around him, he was an experienced and savvy political operator, he had a hinterland, a sense of humour and charisma. Mr Trump has none of these. While his appeal is woefully underestimated by the liberal elite in Washington and elsewhere, he personally is not. What you see is what you get, a New York brawler, a street fighter, a mouth.

If history is kind Mr Trump will not go down in the books as the lucky commander-in-chief or the bold operator, but as the reboot president, the one who epitomised much that was wrong with the political system and forced it to change. Of that legacy, at least, he can be proud.