Back at the dawn of the Trump age, weeks before the 2016 election, a conservative writer chided the media as it struggled with how to cover the outrageous Republican nominee. Salena Zito wrote in the Atlantic — as the title of her buzzy piece had it — that reporters should start “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally.”
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
That’s what Donald Trump’s supporters were doing, she said: Unlike journalists, his voters believed he was a serious candidate who’d be elected, and they didn’t believe he’d do the out-there things he talked about, the stuff that so riled the pundits who took him literally. Her observation seemed prescient, suggesting why Trump fans didn’t mind when, as president, he failed to build a 2,000-mile border wall, get Mexico to pay for it or lock up Hillary Clinton.
Now we know that both Zito and the media got it wrong: Trump should be taken seriously and literally.
Trump is outdoing himself during the 2024 campaign’s final weeks, belching threats and spreading conspiracies. He demonstrated as president what he’s capable of, not least in separating migrant families and inciting an insurrection. Dozens of former advisors have told us that he’d have committed other dangerous, even illegal acts — including ordering troops into the streets, authorized to shoot protesters in the legs — but for the aides’ resistance.
Such resistance likely will not come from sycophants a reelected Trump would appoint. He tells us so. At the Detroit Economic Club last week, Trump acknowledged that as a political novice in the White House, he relied on staffers who often wouldn’t fulfill his wishes. “I now know the game a little better,” he warned.
Which makes his comments on Sunday on Fox News about militarily countering “the enemy from within” — that is, Democrats — all the more chilling. Trump told interviewer Maria Bartiromo that he isn’t worried about election day chaos from his supporters or foreigners but from “radical left lunatics.” Never fear, he said: “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military.”
Fortunately Trump won’t be president on election day. Still, as former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on CNN, “I think we should take those words seriously.” It was Esper who had to deal with Trump’s desire to fire into crowds at racial justice protests in 2020. “I lived through that,” Esper said. Trump’s “inclination is to use the military in these situations.”
On Fox, Trump similarly responded when Bartiromo leadingly asked how he’d deal with “the bureaucrats undermining you” in a second term. His answer: “We have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within is, in my opinion, more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
He cited one example: the man he childishly calls Adam “Shifty” Schiff, the Burbank congressman who was a leader in the House impeachments of Trump and its Jan. 6 committee and is a sure bet to be elected California’s next senator, as Trump himself said. “A total sleazebag,” Trump lied.
Certainly Trump’s most zealous and unstable loyalists take him both seriously and literally. More than 200 Jan. 6 defendants testified that they were heeding Trump’s orders when they came to Washington and attacked the Capitol. Such misplaced fealty is what stokes fears of trouble next month should Trump lose the election, or even if he simply grouses about how it was run.
It wouldn’t be surprising if Trump’s nasty name-check revived death threats against Schiff, yet another reason to take the man seriously and literally. The long list of his “enemies” who have had to get security includes VIPs such as former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley (Trump once said the retired general should be executed for treason), and average Americans such as 2020 election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss in Georgia. “How evil,” Freeman tearfully said in federal court about Trump’s slanders.
After Trump lied that FEMA ignored states slammed by Hurricanes Helene and Milton and squandered money on migrants, an armed North Carolina man was arrested Saturday for allegedly threatening government disaster workers. First responders were ordered out of one county amid unconfirmed reports of “truckloads of armed militia.” And Trump’s dark, dystopian lies about immigrants ruining Springfield, Ohio; Charleroi, Pa.; and Aurora, Colo., have drawn attention to each from neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
He keeps up the incitement. In Aurora on Friday, Trump lied that Vice President Kamala Harris, “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World” and “has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.” He’s vowed to use wartime powers to deport millions. “Getting them out will be a bloody story,” Trump said last month in Mosinee, Wis.
Believe him.
Yet Trump’s normie supporters do not. As a New York Times story about Trump’s Detroit Economic Club appearance began: “A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.” One businessman explained away Trump’s recent call for “one really violent day” in which police would crack down on property crimes as “just a sound bite.”
That’s what Republicans have said since Jan. 6 about Trump’s election fraud falsehoods (despite their initial condemnations) and his summons to the Capitol (“Be there, will be wild!”) and so much more.
Willful delusion about what Trump has done and what he could do if reelected — as he keeps promising, loud and proud — is idiocy in 2024.
Seriously and literally.