A common refrain during the president’s first campaign was that the media took him literally but not seriously while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.
The press would point and sputter at his demagoguery, disturbed by what his popularity revealed about right-wing opinion but confident that the same country that twice elected Barack Obama wouldn’t replace him with an authoritarian clown. Republican voters, on the other hand, were willing to overlook the “mean tweets” because they found their nominee’s views directionally correct in a way that modern GOP politics traditionally hadn’t been. Donald Trump understood their complaint that too many American jobs had been lost to foreign labor and profligate illegal immigration. Everything else was noise.
It’s always been easy to take him seriously but not literally relative to other national figures. He’s never sounded like a politician, for one thing: Voters hold him to the rhetorical standards of internet blowhards because, well, that’s what he is. He’s also a born showman with a comic touch; if he says something you dislike, there’s a fair chance that he’s joking (sort of) or that it’s part of “the show.” Or you might remind yourself that he’s transactional by nature and purports to be a master at the art of the deal. The mean tweets aren’t really mean, in other words—they’re just his way of staking out a “negotiating position.”
Never has America had a president whose political viability depends so heavily on not believing some of the things he says. Imagine taking George H.W. Bush “seriously but not literally.”
It worked for Trump in 2016, though, and somehow worked again last November, after the coup attempt of 2020 proved that when he says he’s going to do something crazy, believe him. Three weeks before Election Day, the New York Times interviewed his supporters at an event in Michigan and found them as incredulous as ever that he’d follow through on his most destructive promises. “People think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering,” Republican pollster Neil Newhouse explained to the paper, “because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.”
Over the past week Americans have been forced to face the fact that, with respect to all sorts of terrible Trump ideas, it’s actually going to happen.
From tariffs to land grabs to immigration gulags to witch doctors setting health policy, the president’s “soft” supporters are discovering late—too late—that they need to take him seriously and literally.
Liberation Day.
“No one knows what the f— is going on.”
That’s what a Trump ally told Politico about “Liberation Day.” Liberation Day is the president’s term for this coming Wednesday, April 2, when he intends to free Americans from the shackles of abundant affordable foreign goods by imposing sweeping tariffs. How steep will those tariffs be? Which countries will be targeted? Which industries will be exempted?
As of this weekend, no one knew. Even the vice president and the White House chief of staff were in the dark, per Politico. A policy that will rock the global economy, goose the risk of stagflation, and jolt U.S. alliances remains unsettled with days to go before it’s implemented. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reportedly told trading partners that he’ll “try” to give them 24 hours notice before the tariffs take effect but stressed that things are too fluid for him to make any promises.
News circulated Sunday night that the president is thinking of going big and slapping tariffs of up to 20 percent on nearly all U.S. trading partners, the sort of “global” policy he initially promised on the trail last year. Americans can’t say they weren’t warned—yet the polling on tariffs is dismal, and markets are likely to tank if he follows through. Why weren’t voters and investors better prepared for something Trump talked about ad nauseam as a candidate?
Because they took him seriously, not literally. They interpreted his chatter about global tariffs as a nod in the direction of the mildly protectionist policies he imposed during his first term.
Some experts and business leaders seem to have believed that the White House simply couldn’t be so economically daft as to implement the sort of broad tariffs Trump kept babbling on about during the campaign. Surely that was protectionist boob bait for the bubbas designed to get him reelected, not a serious trade proposal. Semafor reporter Dave Weigel claims that he’s heard from multiple business journalists that lobbyists are now in hot water with their bosses after assuring them that Trump wouldn’t do the very thing he kept promising incessantly to do once back in office. Oops.
Others assumed that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a hedge-fund manager by profession, would educate the president about the folly of tariffs before he did anything stupid. Oops again: “He definitely has not played the role to date that the markets had expected,” one banker said recently of Bessent. There are no Steve Mnuchins, let alone James Mattises or John Kellys, this time around to keep Trump from blowing things up. One official from his first administration told Politico frankly that “whatever … guard rails that were in place [in] the first administration no longer exist.”
As for congressional Republicans, they’ve always coped with the president to some degree by pretending that he isn’t who he plainly is. Liberation Day is no exception. “While many Hill Republicans have sought to justify his tariff obsession by chalking it up to a negotiating tactic,” Politico noted, “the reality is Trump really believes in the protectionist policies pushed by aides like [Peter] Navarro.” That’s the same Peter Navarro who was on television this weekend insisting that tariffs are actually tax cuts.
The president likes tariffs. He’s bought into his own nonsense about the revenue they’re allegedly going to raise and the jobs they’re going to create. He’s not bluffing, he’s not joking, he’s not “negotiating,” his advisers aren’t going to deter him, and he doesn’t care in the slightest whether you, the American consumer, will soon pay vastly more for that foreign-made item you’ve had your eye on. To understand all of that, all you had to do was listen to him when he campaigned.
Americans should have taken him literally, not just seriously.
Tough talk.
“Liberation Day” is only the latest evidence that Trump is willing to go further in his policies than many of his supporters appear to have assumed.
Take his interest in annexing Greenland. The president didn’t talk about that during the campaign, although he did show his cards briefly during his first term and might have pursued the matter more aggressively had the pandemic not intervened. Even so, I doubt it would have cost him any votes if he had made an issue of it in 2024. His supporters would have treated it as his way of driving a hard bargain with Denmark to gain some sort of concession granting the U.S. greater access to the island. Or, perhaps, as a signal to NATO that it needed to make limiting Russian and Chinese access to the Atlantic a higher priority.
The Greenland ploy would have been understood as directionally sensible rather than as an earnest bid to seize an ally’s territory against its will. No wonder, then, that when he finally started yammering about “ownership” of Greenland shortly after the election, no one paid much attention. Take Trump seriously, not literally.
We should have taken him literally here too.
On Friday J.D. Vance visited America’s military base in Greenland to deliver a Putin-esque rant questioning Denmark’s stewardship of the territory, asserting that the United States has “no other option” but to take a “significant position” in it in order to protect its own security, and declining to rule out the use of military force to make that happen. “We cannot just ignore the president’s desires,” he declared, elegantly stating his own monarchical view of politics if not the Constitution’s.
But he was right. The president does desire ownership of Greenland. He’s not driving a “hard bargain” toward some other end. Annexation is the end. If you doubt that, consider that the right’s most influential propaganda network has begun to beat the drum of manifest destiny, no doubt with encouragement from the White House. Or better yet, listen to Trump himself. “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%,” he told NBC News this weekend, adding hopefully that there’s a “good possibility that we could do it without military force” but that “I don’t take anything off the table.”
The governments of Denmark and Greenland are taking him literally and seriously. The Danish prime minister is set to visit the island this week and the Danish foreign minister has begun appealing to Americans directly on social media to come to their senses. He needn’t bother—the polling on seizing Greenland is already abysmal—but we’re now neck-deep in an international incident that’s cracking the foundation of NATO. All because, once again, the president actually means what he says.
As it dawns on more Americans that Trump means what he says and is willing to go much further than they thought, even some of his sympathizers sound taken aback.
His aggressive demagoguery of James Boasberg and other judges who’ve begun to restrain his immigration policies has left some conservative legal scholars fretting about a constitutional crisis. “I worry that there might be some people in the administration who would actually like to defy a judicial order. Which I think would be a terrible mistake,” John Yoo recently told Axios. “If the courts can’t render reliable decisions, then our legal system doesn’t function. If our legal system doesn’t function, the country is in really bad shape.”
Do you realize how recklessly a president needs to behave to make John Yoo nervous about executive authority?
Ditto for immigration. On no subject has Trump talked tougher than deporting illegal immigrants; removing them by hook or by crook, irrespective of due process, is the essence of his strongman politics and a current in his rhetoric dating back to his first term. But watching him dubiously invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, deny those detained under it any chance to prove their innocence, and quickly pack them off to a de facto “black site” in another country has made even staunch immigration hawks like Mark Krikorian squeamish. Detainees should “have a right to a hearing as to whether the president’s [proclamation] applies to them,” he told The Dispatch recently, sensibly, and obviously.
Getting Krikorian to blanch at immigration restrictions is arguably more shocking than getting Yoo to blanch at executive power. (Yoo also sided with due process rights for detainees in an interview with The Dispatch, in fact.) But what else can he say when claims keep circulating of innocent men being swept up in the dragnet of so-called “gang members” and then rendered to El Salvador?
Many times, in many contexts, Trump has told us what sort of character he is, particularly on the subject of immigration. Why didn’t people believe him?
Witch doctors.
The most destructive example of Americans taking Trump seriously when they should have taken him literally was how he approached health policy last year.
Two days before the election, he was asked whether he might ban certain vaccines on the advice of his top health adviser, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and refused to rule it out. He met privately with vaccine skeptics during the campaign and, on at least 17 occasions, promised to cut federal funding to schools that mandate vaccinations. A month after the election, he told Time magazine that he and Kennedy planned to discuss the repeatedly debunked link between vaccines and autism: “The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. … If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.”
The “seriously, not literally” view of all this was that Trump was blowing smoke to atone to right-wing cranks for having brought COVID vaccines to market in 2020. He’d mutter a few discouraging words about vaccination to pander to them, affirming their belief that the world overreacted to the pandemic, but he surely wouldn’t give Kennedy any real power at the Department of Health and Human Services. Scientists would be left alone and RFK Jr. would be trotted out occasionally to squeak about eating more lettuce or avoiding seed oils or whatever.
We should have taken the president literally.
A few weeks ago, amid a major measles outbreak in Texas, Kennedy went on Fox News and advised millions of viewers that getting infected is in some ways better than being vaccinated. He recommended cod liver oil, rich in Vitamin A, as a treatment for the disease. That turned out as you’d expect. The outbreak is still growing.
Quackery has become official policy. HHS is canceling funding for research on vaccines aimed at coronaviruses and pivoting to an analysis on links between—ta da—vaccination and autism. Go figure: The man whom the agency has tapped to lead that analysis is a contrarian who believes there’s a connection and was once charged with practicing medicine without a license per the Washington Post.
The most promising field in immunology is now at risk. That would be mRNA technology, the same platform that produced the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines and which some scientists believe might eventually treat cancer. Four years of right-wing paranoia and propaganda have made mRNA anathema to Republicans, though, so the National Institutes of Health has begun warning scientists to remove references to the technology in their grant applications.
NIH intends to stop studying vaccine hesitancy as well, although under the circumstances that’s a case of defensible anti-vaxxism. We don’t need a study to explain it: If you want to know why Americans are hesitant, just watch Fox News, or listen to Joe Rogan or an interview with practically any random congressional Republican.
Meanwhile, the White House has cut a lot of funding for scientific research, Matt Yglesias noted last week. Capping “indirect costs” for NIH grants at 15 percent will derail all sorts of studies. Punishing “woke” universities by slashing their NIH funding will do the same. Some research, like studies of HIV, appears to be on the chopping block for simple political considerations. Amid all that, some 10,000 jobs are set to be cut at HHS, conceivably to reduce bureaucratic friction to other witch-doctor kookery that’s coming down the pike.
To Americans, “brain drain” is what it’s called when talented foreigners decide they’d rather work and live here than in the countries where they were born. Now that funds for scientific work are being rug-pulled, we might need to revisit that definition.
The most arresting thing about all of this is that there’s no clear policy reason for it. You can rationalize tariffs as a (moronic) way to try to repatriate jobs, annexing Greenland as an (imperialist) way to gain land and resources, and ignoring due process as an (authoritarian) remedy to an urgent immigration crisis. But the broad assault on scientific infrastructure feels like pure self-sabotage, the starkest possible example of populist rule causing America to fall behind peer nations. I had the thought this weekend that, if and when a vaccine for cancer arrives, I might need to visit Canada or Mexico to get it.
Demagoging vaccination might be the closest we come to book-burning in our misadventure with fascism. Heroic feats of scientific ingenuity save more and more lives every year, yet a cultish movement of obscurantist reactionaries would rather deprive themselves of that knowledge than credit their cultural enemies for it. It’s as if a decade of nationalist invective against “progressives” left the White House with no choice but to try to tear down America’s most obvious example of meaningful progress.
We should have taken Trump literally.
Things to come.
On Sunday NBC News asked the president about running for a third term in 2028, a topic on which he’s been known to joke. I’m not joking, he told the outlet. “A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump said. “There are methods [by] which you could do it.”
Take him seriously—and literally. He means it. Having refused to leave office voluntarily once before, he’s not about to start now.
What the next autogolpe will look like is unclear but I’ve always assumed that he’ll purport to suspend the presidential election altogether by contriving a national emergency. That’s the logic of the Alien Enemies Act: Under dire circumstances like war or invasion, the executive gets to dispense with normal legal constraints like due process. By 2028 he’ll have developed a taste for emergency powers; faced with impending retirement and cultural oblivion, he’ll use them rather than stand aside.
And he won’t be impeached and removed if he tries, rest assured. No matter how well Democrats do in 2026, they won’t do well enough to make removal by the Senate viable. There are too many Republican quislings in Congress to produce 67 votes to convict.
When he says he’s going to do something crazy, believe him. How many “soft” Trump supporters who voted for him last fall, taking him seriously but not literally, are looking around this week and learning that lesson belatedly?
