In the fall of 2016, a journalist popularized a catchy binary to describe the bizarre behavior of Donald Trump and the effect he had on his rapturous followers.
Supporters of the then–Republican presidential nominee, Salena Zito wrote, take Trump “seriously but not literally.” Meanwhile, his detractors, including most of the mainstream press, “take him literally but not seriously.” His roundhouse exaggerations, the sarcasm, the slander, the spurious anecdotes, the not-quite-facts—if you took these literally, we were told, then Trump might indeed seem a clown, a candidate unworthy of the effort required to take him seriously.
If, on the other hand, you recognized his wildcat hyperbole as a signal of a larger virtue—that Trump was a disrupter rejecting conventional modes of political speech to further a coherent agenda—then you freed yourself to take him seriously as a possible president who could do important and necessary things.
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