In a September 2016 piece in The Atlantic, writer Salena Zito described an ironic phenomenon regarding then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s outrageous rhetoric. The press, Zito wrote, “takes him literally, but not seriously,” while Trump’s more fervent supporters “take him seriously, but not literally.”

Almost a decade later, the mainstream media has certainly learned its lesson about not taking Trump seriously; no rational observer of the current presidential race would rule out the strong possibility that Trump is headed for a second term as president.

But Trump’s supporters seem to still believe that when he bellows dehumanizing insults, toxic lies and second-term proposals that sound more like the schemes of a 1930s aspiring dictator than a modern American presidential contender, he doesn’t really mean it. This despite a first term in which he did in fact attempt (and occasionally succeed at) fulfilling some of his darker campaign screeds.

As Trump’s current campaign rhetoric descends into realms chilling even by his own dystopian standards, persuadable voters should resist succumbing to the numbness that his constant stream of rhetorical sewage tends to cause and really consider what’s coming out of his mouth lately.

He has become, more than ever, the most effective spokesman for the truism that he belongs nowhere near power.

From the day in 2015 that he first rode that golden escalator into a campaign grounded in violent fantasies about hordes of roving immigrant criminals, Trump has spoken a language of violence and hate previously unheard of in modern mainstream American politics.

That it’s gotten worse as his neck-and-neck race with Vice President Kamala Harris approaches Election Day isn’t in anyone’s imagination. Consider his rhetorical low points just in the weeks since his unhinged slander on the debate stage about Haitian immigrants eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio:

• At a Pennsylvania rally late last month, Trump suggested “one real rough, nasty ... violent day "of police brutality in order to end crime. “One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out, and it will end immediately, you know?”

• At recent speeches in Wisconsin and Michigan, he falsely claimed that undocumented migrants are rampaging through the Midwest slitting people’s throats: “They grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents.”

• In a radio interview last week, Trump leaned into eugenics while pressing his false claims of a migrant crime wave in the U.S.: “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

• At a rally Saturday in California, Trump referenced an apparent heckler in the audience, suggesting she should get “the hell knocked out of her” when she gets home to her mother.

In case you think such hate speech and flat-out lies can’t spawn real-world violence, consider the impact of Trump’s recent false claims that the Biden administration is purposely shorting red-state regions of hurricane disaster aid. That lie has metastasized on the political right to the point that emergency aid workers responding to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina had to stop working for part of the weekend due to reports of “armed militia" threatening to kill government workers.

A New York Times report this week, talking to Trump supporters about some of his more reckless rhetoric lately, concluded that many of them “are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.” Trump, shrugged one supporter, is “just riling up the news.

Careful. While it’s true that constitutional guardrails held up against Trump’s numerous attempts to smash them during tumultuous first term — thanks mostly to some of the more responsible staffers and judges who defended political norms — his worst instincts weren’t completely held at bay.

Trump’s incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is the most obvious example of that failure but by no stretch the only one.

Trump’s plainly unconstitutional promise to bar Muslims from entering the U.S. was ultimately fulfilled, if in a form weakened by the courts. His damnable policy of separating migrant families at the southern border imposed untold psychological torment on the most innocent of young victims.

His isolationist nonsense and creepy admiration of tyrants did incalculable damage to America’s global stature. We’ll never know how many American lives might have been saved during the pandemic had he shown leadership instead sowing division.

Trump now vows a migrant roundup-and-deportation policy that, in his own recent words, will be a “bloody story.” Project 2025 is replete with other schemes to give Trump near-dictatorial powers, including politically weaponizing the Justice Department and using the military for domestic purposes. Trump’s disavowal of that blueprint should not be believed precisely because so much of it dovetails with his past actions and current rhetoric.

Add to all this a new Supreme Court-approved immunity standard that effectively gives the next president carte blanche to engage in any lawless behavior that can be cloaked in officialdom (Is there any that can’t?), and the prospect of a second Trump presidency should be viewed as a national emergency.

Don’t take our word for it. Take his.

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