Take Him Literally

Donald Trump threatened to destroy a civilization of 90 million people on a Tuesday morning. We've moved on.

On Tuesday morning, Donald Trump posted this on his Truth Social platform:

Yes, the sitting president of the United States threatened to end a civilization of nearly 90 million people.

Time to panic? Not quite, said Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammer:

See? No big deal. Nothing to worry about. In fact, anyone who was worried about it, was a fool. Or something like that. Sure, Trump eventually backed down from his threat of committing an act of genocide, thankfully, but it should probably bother us a bit that he can do that and conservative commentators like Hammer will chide us for thinking that his madman routine is something to worry about.

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But the Salena Zito line stopped working as media criticism a long time ago. At this point, it’s the operating system. It’s what has let ten years of escalating public threats get processed as background noise, each new one making the next easier to brush off, each walkback turned into a reason to doubt the threat ever counted in the first place. On Tuesday morning, the floor gave way.

The permission slip

I went back and read the original Atlantic piece by Zito from September 23, 2016, titled “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally.”

It’s a profile. A sympathetic one by a conservative journalist.

The whole article is Zito trailing Trump backstage at a shale industry conference in Pittsburgh, watching him quietly greet waiters and service workers away from the cameras. She quotes one Black convention worker saying, “I am blown away! The man I just saw there talking to people is nothing like what I’ve seen, day in and day out, in the news.” That’s the framing the famous line lives inside. The whole point of the profile is to argue that critical coverage of Trump had been getting him wrong.