Take Trump Literally

His willingness to risk global financial meltdown also makes it more likely that he will do the seemingly unimaginable in other areas.

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Literal tariffs. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

Donald Trump is probably the human being now trodding the surface of the Earth about whom the most has been written. Nearly all of that commentary is depressingly evanescent; much of it consists simply in using fancy language to convey the writer’s disapproval. If you attempted to read through the entire output certain leading newspapers and magazines have published about Trump, their oeuvre would seem to give credence to the—otherwise less than wholly convincing—philosophical tradition of emotivism, according to which moral statements such as “murder is wrong” really translate into little more than the exclamation “boo to murder.”

My keen awareness of this fact presents me with some difficulty in how to react to this political moment. I have in my time written dozens, if not hundreds, of articles full of fancy language which ultimately translated into my unwavering conviction that “boo to Trump” is a well-justified sentiment. But while I am as convinced of this conclusion today as I was in the spring of 2017—and fulsome expressions of that sentiment remain as likely now as they did back then to make the most-read lists of the country’s most prominent publications—I am also deeply conscious that they don’t seem to have convinced anybody who did not already feel the same way. For the most part, I simply do not have it in me to contribute yet another instance to this well-trodden genre.

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Among this sea of evanescent commentary, one article improbably stands out. Back in 2016, Salena Zito, a conservative writer and faithful chronicler of Trump—she later stood a few feet from him when a gunman attempted to assassinate him in Butler, Pennsylvania—argued that “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” This idea quickly went viral, entering the bloodstream of how many commentators thought about Trump, and it retains a certain plausibility even today.

Take Trump’s promise, much repeated during his first presidential campaign, that he would build a wall on the southern border—and make Mexico pay for it. He did not in fact succeed in building a wall across the entire border. Mexico steadfastly refused to pay for any such project. In the literal sense, his promise did not materialize. But border crossings really were much lower during Trump’s first term than they would go on to be under Joe Biden. And Trump, for better or worse, really did use tariffs and diplomatic threats to extract significant concessions from Mexico. Arguably, supporters of his who took Trump’s promise seriously rather than literally have some reason to be satisfied.

It is also tempting to follow Zito’s advice in interpreting Trump’s recent statements, many of which are even more outlandish than the promises he made in the past. Of late, the president has liked to call Justin Trudeau the “Governor of Canada,” suggesting that our northerly neighbors could soon become our 51st state. He has repeatedly insinuated that he might run for a third term in office, suggesting that the term limits enshrined in the 22nd Amendment might not apply to him. And, again and again, he has suggested that the United States should take control of Greenland, by military means if necessary.

It is, per Zito, obvious that one purpose of these statements is to troll Trump’s political opponents. From the beginning of his political rise, he has thrived on half-jokingly saying things which would be earnestly condemned by the least popular members of the political establishment; he could then point to their highfalutin expressions of “boo” as proof that, whatever his own faults, he must clearly have done something right if he managed to earn the humorless disapproval of the people the voters most hate. If you take everything that Trump says literally, you really do fall into his trap.

But the events of the last week show that it is just as big a mistake to dismiss Trump’s most outlandish statements as pure trolling. The most important difference between 2016 and now is that Trump has come back to the White House with a much more loyal staff and a much greater determination to turn his plans into reality. Across domains from foreign policy to immigration enforcement, that has translated into much more radical action than at the beginning of his first term in office.

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Over the last months, many pronouncements which initially seemed like hot air have turned out to be serious business.

Take the Department of Government Efficiency. When Trump announced the creation of DOGE, many commentators falsely predicted that this was just a clever way to sideline Elon Musk; as one viral post on social media claimed, “If you read the fine print, this new DOGE department [are] glorified consultants. This is a massive nothing-burger.” The truth has turned out to be very different. Musk has used DOGE to make significant cuts across the government, to fire thousands of federal bureaucrats, and to effectively shutter big agencies like USAID.

The same has turned out to be true for Trump’s promises to go after universities for radical campus activism. When the administration first announced that it would use executive power to force universities to punish students for breaking university rules, for example by occupying campus buildings or intimidating Jewish students, it was easy to imagine that they might direct the (since abolished) Department of Education to investigate such matters. Instead, the administration abruptly cut billions of dollars of funding from universities that got into its crosshairs and started to deport non-citizens without bothering to prove that they had engaged in any illegal behavior. The administration’s assault on free speech on campus goes well beyond anything that somebody who assumed we should take its actions seriously rather than literally would have predicted.

Even Trump’s repeated vows to reward his friends and punish his enemies has turned out to have more substance than many expected. During his first term in office, the campaign chants of “Lock Her Up” didn’t translate into much concrete action. This time around, he has already pardoned anybody convicted of crimes in association with the Assault on the Capitol on January 6; revoked secret service protection for senior officials who have in the past been critical of him, such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo; and effectively exacted revenge on major law firms that had represented plaintiffs critical of Trump, including WilmerHale.

But the most obvious example for how failing to take Trump literally can lead to big miscalculations is, of course, his trade policy. Trump has been obsessed with the dangers posed by America’s trade deficits with rising nations since at least the 1980s, when Japan was the principal object of his ire. He opposed NAFTA, incessantly talked about China, and lambasted free trade throughout the 2016 campaign. He promised to get serious about tariffs when he ran for reelection last fall. And key members of his economic team published papers that called for strikingly high tariffs.

Even so, both Wall Street and most of the commentariat has long taken Trump’s hatred for the existing economic order seriously rather than literally. Everybody expected him to impose some tariffs on some countries. Few imagined that he would impose such high tariffs on virtually every country in the world as to risk blowing up the world’s trading system, tanking the stock market, and courting a global recession. In the end, it took the most turbulent week on Wall Street induced by a policy announcement in living memory for Trump to announce a climb down—one that, incidentally, for now remains more temporary and partial than many reactions to it suggest. (Trump has so far only promised a 90-day moratorium on most tariffs above 10%, and sky-high tariffs on China for now remain in place.)

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Zito’s advice suggests that common sense should guide our predictions for what Trump will do next. It implies that when he announces a policy that more or less stays within the bounds of what another president might do, he likely will pursue it. If he promises to cut taxes on corporations, for example, he may well prioritize that in negotiations over the next budget.

When Trump makes extraordinary claims that are far outside the bounds of normal politics, by contrast, he will likely wind up doing something far less extreme. His promises to bring Greenland under America’s control by any means necessary will likely turn out to be mere bluster; in the end, the administration will, on this view, settle for a negotiated agreement about enhancing Arctic security with Denmark. Similarly, Trump’s threats to disobey rulings by the Supreme Court are just a way to vent his frustration; in the end, Zito’s reading suggests, Trump won’t be willing to risk a major constitutional crisis.

But in light of Trump’s extraordinary willingness to risk a global financial meltdown over the course of the last week, it seems to me that predictions predicated on Zito’s advice are now more likely to prove wrong than right. In his second term in office, Trump has grown much more willing and capable of breaking with precedent, even when that involves steps that would have seemed outlandish until recently. Anybody who wants to get a good handle on what he will do next might just have to start by taking him both seriously and literally.