In late 2016, the Atlantic published a campaign trail dispatch by Salena Zito, a conservative reporter, exploring Trump’s appeal to his voters. The piece was forgettable save one line that has been quoted endlessly for the past eight years: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
In the years since, “seriously not literally” has become a punchline among political journalists. Time after time, Trump and his fans have proven that they do take his outlandish pronouncements literally. When he said the 2020 election was stolen and demanded Vice President Mike Pence unlawfully attempt to overturn it, he meant it — and his most hardcore supporters staged a riot to try to turn his vision into reality.
If there’s a group of Trump supporters whom Zito’s phrase actually describes, it’s not the superfans, but the squishes, like the Republicans who blanched at January 6, but loved the tax cuts and court appointments that preceded it. For these Republicans, his authoritarianism pronouncements are just part of the Trump show, and they can return to treating him seriously as a “normal” Republican candidate for president: assessing his policies against Harris’s and naturally finding hers wanting. The bitter dilemma of choosing between a Democrat and democracy can be wished away.
As infuriating as this attitude is, it does have a little bit of grounding in truth. All of us, to one degree or another, take Trump “seriously but not literally.” We do it because actually confronting what a second Trump presidency would mean is tough even for his most ardent critics to wrap their heads around.
At various points during the campaign, Trump and his team have suggested putting millions of detained immigrants in camps, replacing the civil service with Trump cronies, deploying the military to repress dissenters, setting up special prosecutors to investigate Democrats, imposing 1,000 percent across-the-board tariffs, putting the Federal Reserve under political control, withdrawing from NATO, and unconstitutionally running for a third term in office.
The specter of out-and-out authoritarianism, a crashing economy, and an international system shorn of the alliances that keep the global peace sounds apocalyptic. Actually trying to envision the enormity of this world is psychologically taxing; trying to live as if this were indeed an imminent possibility invariably leads to a life monomaniacally devoted to trying to stop it.
For most people, that’s neither desirable nor possible. And Trump’s fog of distortion creates a mental space where one can reasonably tell oneself it’s not necessary. He lies and exaggerates so much that it’s hard to tell which of his policy ideas demand being taken literally. You can make educated guesses — though it’s achingly clear he’ll try to fight the 2024 election result if he loses. But it makes sense that we all do at least a little bit of “seriously, but not literally”: it helps manage the fear and uncertainty inherent to a second Trump presidency.
The buffoonery helps with that.
Laughing at Trump makes it easier to see him as something other than the boogeyman. I mean, look at him! He’s swaying on stage to “Ave Maria,” babbling about Pavarotti, making Kristi Noem sweat. Who couldn’t appreciate that?
The problem, though, is that Trump is running for president of the United States. He wants to be in charge of the most powerful nation in human history, for his fingers to be on a nuclear button that could annihilate the planet.
It would be bad enough if someone who wanted this kind of power were just a clown. That he’s a clown with a proven track record of doing insanely dangerous things makes the laughter feel a bit hollow.
Former President Barack Obama — who I’m convinced understands Trump better than almost anyone — recently gave a speech that distilled the problem down to its core. After describing some of Trump’s recent lies about hurricanes, Obama asked, “When did that become okay?” He expands:
And that’s just it. It shouldn’t be okay, but enough people have accepted it that it is by default okay.
The buffoonery helps us cope with the normalizing of the abnormal, the fact that the old rules for politics that kept things safe are being blown up at a faster and faster rate. When the prospect of a second Trump presidency feels too real, there’s always the comfort of laughing at him.
