The increasingly bizarre — and ominous — home stretch of Trump’s 2024 campaign

Here is a short and incomplete list of things that former President Donald Trump has done this week:

• Sunday: Trump says the US military should be deployed against “the enemy within” on Election Day. It’s unclear who exactly he’s talking about, but he does refer to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) as an example of a domestic enemy later in the interview.
• Monday: Trump stops a town hall to conduct a 40-minute impromptu dance party, where he plays songs like “YMCA” and “Hallelujah” on stage with an obviously confused South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R).
• Tuesday: When asked during a Bloomberg interview about his policy toward Google, Trump responds with an extended riff on an election lawsuit in Virginia. When prompted to actually answer the question, Trump launches into a rant about critical stories appearing on Google News, said he’d called “the head of Google” to complain, and then threatened to “do something” to the company in response.
• Also Tuesday: Trump warns that “hydrogen is the new car,” and tells a story about a man who died in a hydrogen car explosion near a tree and could not be identified by his wife. Hydrogen-fueled cars are in fact a 10-year-old technology with a small and declining global market share. There is no evidence that they can explode like the Hindenburg, as a car with hydrogen fuel cells is not the same thing as a dirigible inflated with hydrogen gas.
• Wednesday: Asked about the “enemy within” comments from Sunday, Trump doubles down — saying Democrats like Schiff are indeed such an enemy, that they are “Marxists” and “fascists” who are “so evil” and “dangerous for our country.”

Throughout these events, Trump has come off as (alternately) a buffoon and a would-be dictator. One minute, you’re laughing at his campy dance moves and Hindenburg car rants, the next you’re worrying that he really might try to send troops after American citizens.

Yet the two Trumps, the clown and the menace, are intimately tied together: The absurdity helps normalize his dangerousness.

For his biggest supporters, the schtick helps generate a sense of joy in transgression. For non-MAGA Republicans, it helps them feel comfortable ignoring what makes Trump extraordinary in favor of traditional grubby partisanship. For many of Trump’s opponents, it makes him seem like something we don’t have to worry about all the time — even when we really do. His absurdity works to make a horrifying reality our reality, something assimilable into the mental frames that we use to get through the day.

I don’t think Trump does this by design. He’s not an evil genius, planning out moves 10 steps in advance. This is just who he is as a person; what you see on stage is what you get.

But that persona arose from a gut-level understanding of human behavior, one that has allowed Trump to build extraordinary political and business careers on a foundation of lying to everyone around him and pushing the boundaries of “normal” to the breaking point. Without his buffoonery, none of this works — you get unpopular figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. JD Vance, who have all of Trump’s cruelty but none of his charm.

Put differently: the dancing is a kind of alchemy that takes his terrifying ideas, like deploying the military against “the enemy within,” and turns them into just another day in American politics.

The clown prince of America

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, a description of Trump’s relationship to his fans 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 context, Zito was talking about Trump lying about unemployment among young Black men. At the time, he claimed that the unemployment rate was about three times what it actually was — a figure he arrived at in part by counting full-time students as “unemployed.” Zito acknowledged that this is false in a literal sense, but believes the press is wrong to dismiss him over it. She believed Trump’s fans understand the inflated numbers to be emblematic of some larger truth, caring less about facticity than the general picture he paints of a broken America.

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 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.

Republicans who blanched at January 6, but loved the tax cuts and court appointments that preceded it, are among the most likely to dismiss the idea that Trump should be taken at his word. For these Republicans, his authoritarianism pronouncements are just part of the Trump show — a kind of brand-burnishing performance on par with silly pronouncements like “hydrogen is the new car.”

With his most extraordinary ideas safely slotted into the clown box, 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. The truth is that 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.

If we took all of that literally, really integrated the reality of what these steps would mean into our daily behavior, it would be hard to live life normally. 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 — it’s achingly clear he’ll try to fight the 2024 election result if he loses — but that’s really the best any of us can do.

Trump demands to be taken literally, but taking everything he does seriously is both psychologically difficult and analytically mistaken. So 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? 

We laugh not only because he’s funny (which he objectively is), but because then we don’t have to confront the reality of what he truly represents — at least, for a minute.

The problem, though, is that Trump is a fundamentally serious thing. He’s not just doing a traveling stand-up show; he’s 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:

If your coworkers acted like that, they wouldn’t be your coworkers very long. If you’re in business and somebody you’re doing business with just outright lies and manipulates you, you stop doing business with them. Even if you had a family member who acted like that, you might still love them, but you’d tell them you got a problem and you wouldn’t put them in charge of anything. And yet, when Donald Trump lies, cheats, or shows utter disregard for our Constitution, when he calls POWs “losers” or fellow citizens “vermin,” people make excuses for it. 

And that’s just it. This 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.