Take Trump seriously but not literally.
Salena Zito, in an article for The Atlantic, noted that the news media take Trump's more outlandish statements literally but not seriously, while his supporters do the inverse
Many Americans saw the 2024 election as an existential moment for democracy. If the future of democracy was on the line and the fate of the republic was in the balance, why didn’t this argument work? Biden and Kamala both asserted that democracy itself was on the ballot and Trump represented a unique threat. Whatever the merits of this argument it did not carry the day since one of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.
As many journalists and Trump’s opponents have noted, you should take Trump seriously but not literally. This view seems justified by experience in that Trump was president for four years. He’s a known quantity and the cataclysmic predictions which preceded his first term did not come to pass. Many critics of Trump might object by pointing to the transformed Supreme Court and judiciary in general and the resulting overturning of Roe v Wade or a fairly obvious attempt to overturn democracy, but still, by luck or otherwise, it was not the end of the world. True there was a Muslim ban but this was limited by the Supreme Court. Mexico was not forced to pay for the wall, Trump did not leave NATO, he didn’t lock up Hilary, he didn’t repeal Obamacare and he didn’t radically cut the Education Department and many Americans look back at the Trump years as prosperous and peaceful. “It’s the salience of issues today that colour the memories that people have of Trump,”[79] said John Sides, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt. The salient issues in 2024 were inflation and immigration. ‘A week is a long time in politics’ observed British PM Harold Wilson and four years put Trump in a distant and more prosperous and more peaceful past. In 2024 Pew Research found that positive or ‘warm’ feelings towards Trump had improved steadily among Republicans since 2016. ‘Republicans and Republican leaners feel very warm toward Trump. About eight-in-ten (78%) rate him very warmly (60%) or warmly (18%), while relatively small shares say they have a neutral (8%) or cold (14%) view of him’.[80]
Trump's rhetoric is unlike any of his rivals but is he serious?
''He has called for the execution of the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He now urges police to shoot shoplifters. He has begun characterizing his political adversaries as subhuman “vermin” who must be “rooted out.” Parroting the Third Reich while claiming (no doubt truthfully, in this case) that he has never read “Mein Kampf,” Trump has declared that immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia “poison the blood” of the United States.''
Another explanation is that Trump’s violent rhetoric sounds like he’s not being serious. It’s just too crazy. For example Trump’s assertion that in “one really violent day” would end property crime “One rough hour — and I mean real rough,” Trump said. “The word will get out and it will end immediately.” This is the rhetoric of your mad uncle who’s had a glass too many- is it meant to be a joke? Also, what does it mean and how could it be done? The impracticality and ambiguity of Trump’s musings tend towards the conclusion that he won’t actually do any of this. The established fact of Trump’s cascade of lies and falsehoods also tends to the conclusion amongst the non-Maga Trump voters that Trump communicates in crowd-pleasing hyperbole not reality. So when he says he’ll weaponize the Justice Department and jail political opponents or purge the government of non-loyalists it’s easy to think it won’t happen. In a New York Times/Siena College poll, 41 percent of likely voters agreed with the assessment that “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.”[81] When in his book Bob Woodward, cites General Mark A. Milley as saying the former president is “fascist to the core.” It doesn’t fit what actually happened and appears to be scaremongering.
It is also possible to suspend one's disbelief that Trump is serious because he embodies unreality. He is a creation of the media, a celebrity whose persona was created on the TV show The Apprentice. Like fictional villains and fictional heroes, Trump can engender admiration or approbation but not genuine fear.
“The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person.” What The New York Times television critic James Poniewozik meant is that Trump’s behavior is not driven by the strategies, motivations, and beliefs that we typically attribute to full-fledged people. If you want to gain insight into Trump, ask yourself this: What might happen next on television? What would a TV character do?
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-mass-psychology-of-trumpism/
'Tom Griffin, in 2006, after negotiating a real estate deal with Trump in a Scottish pub. “It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump,” a befuddled Griffin noted afterward. He found the encounter very strange. Indeed, Griffin seemed to experience something like ontological confusion. Did I see the real Trump? Or was he playing a role? The answer to both questions turns out to be “Yes!” That was the real Trump. The real Trump is the role. There is no other Trump.