Opinion | If you think Trump is just bluffing, you’re the sucker

A couple of years ago, I wrote a retrospective of the Trump presidency by describing how Donald Trump used humor as a weapon. He won the Republican presidential primaries as he used insult comedy to attack his political rivals and put down racial minorities, women and people with disabilities. He entertained his base by roaming the stage and riffing on current events like a stand-up comic. He floated extreme and offensive ideas to present himself as an anti-establishment firebrand — but was able to play them off as a blend of hyperbole and jokes when they got too much backlash.

Well, he just did it again. And many of his supporters’ dismissal of his most extreme rhetoric as unserious is helping pave the path for the erosion of multicultural democracy.

Trump’s third presidential campaign was his most extreme, hostile and outlandish one yet. He used textbook fascist rhetoric to describe migrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” He used classic dictatorial tropes to identify the left as “vermin” and “the enemy within” and promised vicious repression. He unleashed a firehose of lies, repeating his claims that the 2020 election was rigged, that migrants were eating pets and that schools were secretly doing transgender surgery on children.

Trump also floated preposterous ideas that undermined his own argument against the Democrats. While running on bringing down prices, Trump also floated the idea of replacing the income tax with revenue from across-the-board tariffs — an inflationary proposal that some economists say would effectively put a 130% sales tax on all imported goods.

Yet once again, he couched most of his rhetoric in a comic register, blurring the line between earnestness and irony, treating rallies like stand-up gigs and constantly used jokes to connect with his followers (often using some pretty strange bits).

Some of Trump’s die-hard followers are happy to back Trump’s most ludicrous ideas. But a key reason he gets away with so much of what he says is because many people perceive — or at least claim to perceive — the most offensive or extreme parts of what he says as unserious. In a New York Times/Siena College poll weeks before the election, 41% of likely voters agreed with the claim that “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.” And a Data for Progress poll in October found that fewer than 4 in 10 likely voters thought Trump believed in his more outlandish and extreme statements, including his claim that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

Trump’s ability to dodge accountability for his most extreme rhetoric has also been captured in reporting on voter sentiment. When a New York Times reporter asked Trump supporters in October about his promises such as packing the federal government with loyalists, persecuting political opponents, carrying out the biggest deportation operation in history or instituting tariffs that could rock the economy, they said they didn’t believe Trump’s claims. One 40-year-old Detroit Trump supporter told the Times that he believed Trump’s pledge to purge the federal government was “for publicity” and for “riling up the news.”

In some of my conversations with Trump supporters, I’ve seen a similar dynamic play out. They’ve discussed how they think he’s good for the economy or for slowing down immigration, but when you ask about his most authoritarian rhetoric or his brutal commentary about mistreating migrants, they’ll shrug and say something to the effect of “that’s just Trump being Trump.”

It is, of course, true that Trump wraps a tremendous amount of his commentary in a semi-ironic tone or uses cartoonish hyperbole to make some points that he probably doesn’t really mean. But this doesn’t mean it’s not a serious problem. 

Without even getting into the substance of his rhetoric, Trump’s joker affect makes him a poor, irresponsible leader. A fundamental premise of representative democracy is that voters elect leaders who make clear promises and then try to deliver on them. If all of Trump’s rhetoric and policy commitments are shrouded in a haze of “we don’t know if Trump actually meant this,” then he is failing on the most basic level of fulfilling popular rule.

It is absurd that the public has to wait and guess to see whether he was being serious or joking about instituting tariffs so large that they could throw the U.S. economy into a tailspin, or if he’ll pursue minor ones to protect a few select industries. It is also ludicrous that some of Trump’s more moderate supporters seem to be willing to take the gamble that he was just exaggerating about how far he would go in wreaking havoc on the federal government to enhance his power.

The bigger issue, however, is that Trump’s track record shows that he should always be taken seriously. While any given pledge may or may not be literally true, his extreme talk about degrading democracy and treating vulnerable people poorly has always been directionally accurate.

Trump really did try to capitalize on lies about the election and try to lead a mob to overturn the election results. Trump really did decline to take a strong stand against white supremacists, and America saw a surge in hate crimes during his tenure. Trump really did oversee a cruel family separation policy when it came to deporting undocumented immigrants. Trump really did try to use loyalists at the Justice Department to subvert democracy. Trump really did, according to his former defense secretary Mark Esper, ask if he could shoot protesters — only to reportedly face resistance from his advisers.

Both Trump and his supporters benefit from his winking, ironic tone and being able to resort to the defense that any specific claim of his might not be serious. Trump gets to activate the extreme parts of his base while reserving the right to say anything is a joke if the backlash is too intense. And his outwardly “moderate” supporters get to try to justify their public support of him by cherry-picking which of his positions seem most defensible and which ones they get to claim they’re not liable for because they were purportedly said in jest or as an act of pure provocation.

But after nine years of Trump in politics, four as president capped by an attempted self-coup, we know there is no norm Trump won’t break, nor is there any idea too extreme for him to execute in reality. Anyone that assumes Trump is bluffing is the sucker at the poker table.