The Nihilistic Unreality of Treating the President like a Rorschach Test
On Taking Trump "Seriously, not Literally"
In September 2016, the conservative writer Salena Zito provided a conceptual framework for civil society to categorize—and therein rationalize—the ascendance of Donald Trump. The press, Zito wrote for the Atlantic, took Trump “literally, but not seriously” while his supporters took him “seriously, but not literally.” This distinction was quickly reiterated by Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel who invoked it during a speaking engagement with the National Press Club days before the general election.
Eight years later, two months into the second Trump administration, our institutional arrangements are under immense strain. What we’ve taken for granted about the separation of powers is being directly and systematically challenged at unspeakably high costs: the lives of children, public employment for thousands, public services for countless more.
Individual rights are in jeopardy. Given the flagrant disappearance of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, it is safe to assume the government will continue to threaten and punish perceived transgressors: Palestinians, Jews, immigrants, the trans community, and anyone falling under the rubric of DEIA, to name a few. Khalil’s case in particular will test the practical effect of the First Amendment against government repression.
Meanwhile, Trump’s slapdash tariffs—along with his babbling madness that Canada be annexed—have transformed the U.S.’s relationship with its northern neighbor. Grabbing coffee with a Canadian friend a couple weeks ago, I fully registered for the first time that he was a Canadian. This fact, previously breezy and biographical, suddenly had stark geopolitical significance.
These are just a few illustrations of the chaos unfolding around us. Are we to take any of it literally? Or should we rationalize it and retreat into ourselves, disregarding literal appraisals of reality for “serious” ones?
From the beginning, the distinction between the “literal” and the “serious” was a pernicious form of propaganda. Its explanatory power was profound, yet what it exemplified was not, as Zito and Thiel would have it, the subjective mindsets of Trump voters but rather the top-down imposition of a nihilistic unreality, an unreality which Trumpism helped engender and from which it continues to benefit.
What follows is the first of several entries exploring the roles truth, falsity, and unreality have played—and should play—in U.S. politics. To be sure, this is well-trodden territory. Yet I think we need more careful and honest consideration of what’s happening, not less. Thinking with Professor Jamal Greene, we need more people willing to speak openly about emboldened authoritarianism, not fewer. For my part, this essay focuses on a particular rhetorical move popularized in 2016 which created a permission structure to choose one’s reality a la carte and which has clear ripple effects today.
Salena Zito and the Inception of the Serious/Literal Distinction
When Zito and Thiel first floated the distinction, Trump had not only rejected prevailing political aesthetics but endorsed explicit racism and xenophobia on the campaign trail. He demanded a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and repeatedly insisted that the U.S. would build a wall along the southern border because Mexico was sending “rapists” north. The serious/literal distinction, then, gave shell shocked liberals a path to reassure themselves of Trump’s normalcy and gave Trump’s supporters a path to minimize his most egregious claims. Both paths led away from reality.
Here’s Zito in September 2016:
“Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,” [Trump] says. “Fifty-eight percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.”
It’s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless.
It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, “Now that’s interesting.”
Understanding what this passage meant at the time is vital for appreciating its consequences today. Start with a premise everyone in the story shares. Trump’s claim that the unemployment rate for Black youth was “fifty-eight percent” was wrong. Both Zito and the “fact-checkers” knew this. Indeed, as Zito recognizes, Trump’s assertion nearly tripled the actual number—from 20.6% to 58%.
Allowing us this bit of shared reality, Zito’s next move was to shatter it, dismissing efforts to anchor Trump to the truth as “distraction.” It was somehow wrongheaded for the press to correct the record, to take Trump “literally.” Much better to take him “seriously.”
But what, exactly, do these concepts mean? Zito implicitly suggests that to take Trump “literally” is to nitpick him. This is a coherent concept at the interpersonal level. I suspect most of us have had our words unfairly parsed in a conversation or argument. Zito characterizes the “distraction” of the “fact-checkers” in much this way. Yet, crucially, she wasn’t highlighting interpersonal dynamics in 2016 but seeking instead to further a collective understanding of how a candidate for President should be treated by all of civil society.1
This—bad faith, technical parsing—is to take Trump literally. So what does it mean to take him seriously? Zito doesn’t say, content to contrast it with literalism and to frame it, without evidence, as an approach adopted by Trump’s supporters. In doing so, she implies that a “serious” orientation toward Trump involves understanding the spirit rather than the letter of his words, the forest rather than the trees. And Zito’s attribution of these competing approaches to distinct tribes—the literalism of the press, the seriousness of the People—lets her conjure up ressentiments between “liberal elites” and “everyday Americans” without an explicit word to that effect.
Thiel Turns the Dial to 11
Peter Thiel advanced the baton a month later in October 2016. In prepared remarks, he gave lip service to an array of progressive concerns—medical debt and student debt; increased family expenses and decreased family incomes; forever wars; wealth and income inequality. Conceding that Trump was an “imperfect” person, calling his Access Hollywood comments “unacceptable,” Thiel reaffirmed his endorsement of Trump’s candidacy. Trump, Thiel argued, was right on trade; he was right on war; and he was right in rejecting the “false reassuring stories that tell us everything is fine.”2
In the Q&A, National Press Club President Thomas Burr asked Thiel whether he supported Trump’s “comments and rhetoric about banning Muslims from traveling to the United States.” Thiel responded by lifting Zito’s literal/serious construct verbatim:
I don’t support a religious test. I certainly don’t support the specific language Trump has used in every instance. But I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally. So when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, or things like that, the question is not are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China, or how exactly are you going to enforce these tests. What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy. We’re going to try to figure out how do we strike the right balance between cost and benefits.
Once again, the media is said to take Trump literally while his voters take him seriously, something Thiel knows because he can apparently read minds. When voters hear that Trump wants to build a wall, they actually hear that “we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.” And when they hear that Trump plans to ban Muslims from entering the United States, they actually hear that “[w]e’re going to try to figure out how do we strike the right balance between cost and benefits.”
So rendered, early stage Trumpism reflected nothing more than banal and meaningless yearnings for the “sensible,” for the “benefits” of policy to outweigh its “cost.” In this way, the serious/literal distinction granted carte blanche, bipartisan permission to self-delude. Those who liked Trump but were made uncomfortable by his literal words could simply rewrite them. Liberals could proceed as if Trump was selling bog standard D.C. pablum rather than an intensifying nativism and xenophobia.
This outs the distinction as political propaganda, and Thiel’s specific use of it, seeking to legitimate an ever-growing chasm between truth and untruth, proves its potency. No longer a tool to dismiss discrete statistical misrepresentations, taking Trump seriously now entailed wholesale transformations in meaning. Build the wall? No, “sensible policy.” Ban Muslims? No, “costs and benefits.” This process of mistranslation allowed Trump and those in his orbit to create realities all their own, realities they now seek to impose on all of us.
The serious/literal distinction was never defended on its own terms. No one provided evidence that it aligned with the actual sentiments of Trump voters nor defended its conceptual usefulness. It is, and has always been, a device for laundering a contemptible politics, for collapsing distinctions between truth and falsity, a normative claim masquerading as description. It conditioned Trump’s supporters to shed any guilt they might feel about their choices—he doesn't actually mean what he says. And, ironically, it conditioned Trump’s opponents to take him less seriously than they should have—he doesn’t actually mean what he says. Four years later, we were gifted both the Big Lie and a storm on the Capitol led in part by members of QAnon, a stupefying conspiracy for the internet age that Trump himself has encouraged.
Influential people who know better have celebrated—glib, cruel, and condescending—the ways in which care for truth has dissolved. They are convinced their dreams will fill the void, the dawn of Catholic integralism; of white nationalism; of techno-utopia. I do not take these people seriously, but I do take them literally. I believe that a foundation for making our sick politics better will require a reorientation away from these craven cynicisms and back toward truth. We should care about it, not least of all because, whether we like it or not, it cares about us.
To be clear, our political problems will not be solved by hiring more fact-checkers. Trumpism will not be overcome with more reports detailing his wrongdoings. Yet truth as a civic virtue, even if not a sufficient condition for healthy politics, is a necessary one. People must be willing to identify and demonstrate lies, call out unreality, even and especially when it feels most hopeless to do so. If we’re to break through the paralytic detachment Trumpian unreality reinforces, we have to both care about truth—what it is, that is exists—and, in part by caring for each other, ask those around us to do the same.
Note that Zito’s chosen illustration of the serious/literal distinction is the unemployment rate of young Black people. Surely no liberal—and she was writing for the Atlantic’s readership, after all—would deny that this presented a moral and political problem worth addressing. Why, then, were members of the liberal press spending so much time on the details? Why was it that Trump wanted to help young Black people and all liberal journalists could do was throw gotchas in his face?
I cannot know this, of course—I’m going to resist the urge to make claims on another’s mind—but my strong suspicion is that Zito’s choice of issue was strategic. What better way to convince liberals to relax their exacting standards than by invoking an issue they claim to care about? What better way to lower expectations with respect to Trump’s relationship to the truth?
The strategic use of left-liberal causes to launder conservative politics is worth several essays all its own.