By the time President Donald Trump told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press in May that he would not “rule out” using military force to annex Greenland, I was pretty sure that I’d been had. He first outraged me with his Greenland plan six years ago and has brought it up at intervals ever since, periodically stirring up the Danish prime minister and domestic critics by, for example, posting an image of the Trump Tower Las Vegas photoshopped into a frozen village. “I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything,” he told Welker, inadvertently describing his whole approach to political communication as a practice of toying with the general American electorate, if not specifically me.
At this point I can admit he played me on Greenland, although even now I hesitate to say so in print. For all I know he could invade tomorrow, and in this regard, he plays me still. In defense of those of us who were fooled, though, Trump has spent the last decade training us to accept remarks more outlandish than that. Whatever else might be said of him, he has solved the problem of public speaking, in roughly the same way “Woolly Bully” solved the problem of song lyrics: by saying all sorts of things but meaning very little.
If American politicians have historically spoken in ways that seem wooden or uncandid, it is because their speech is at once necessary and dangerous. One cannot seek office without addressing the people, but to address the people is to invite disaster. Known gaffe machine Joe Biden confronted this hazard throughout his career, transcending it by misspeaking so often that misspeaking became part of his personal brand — a strategy that worked right up until it didn’t in the first debate of the 2024 election. Other national figures have kept their microphone time brief and anodyne, speaking only when necessary and avoiding firm language when they do.
Our president has taken the opposite approach. From the moment he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy and wound up calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” he established a pattern of calumny, hyperbole, name-calling, speculation and nonsense that made it clear nothing he said could be taken at face value, except the stuff he meant. Identifying that stuff amid his spray of unserious remarks requires a knowledge of his mental state that no one else has. It’s impossible to know when Trump is joking, when he’s off on a rant and when he might actually mean what he says.
His weaponization of this just-saying-stuff strategy is Trump’s major contribution to electoral politics. At this point in his improbably long career as a guy who either is or could be president, he has opened up space to lie, reverse course or simply screw up in ways no previous American leader has managed, freeing himself from nearly all consequences for his own speech. This freedom is not just negative. Trump’s commitment to loose talk has given him unprecedented leeway to act on his words without criticism or debate, before people have even decided whether he’s serious.
Trump’s unserious remarks run the gamut of rhetorical modes. He is probably the most sarcastic president in history. He speculates into microphones and cameras with no particular concern for facts, rants to visiting dignitaries and stadium crowds alike and routinely issues threats he never follows through on, interspersing them with public acts of revenge. Does he contradict himself? Reader, he contains multitudes, though none of it seems to stay contained for long. His recent about-face on Jeffrey Epstein reflects his willingness to weigh in on controversial issues with no firm commitment to his own position: In 2019, Trump demanded a “full investigation” of the financier’s death and purported client list, but now he frames questions about them as a conspiracy concocted by Democrats.
The confused, exhausted state in which we find ourselves after 10 years of continuously trying to guess when Trump means what he is saying feels, two presidencies in, like a chronic neurological condition. It began in 2015, with the problem of when and how to say that he was joking.
Trump does sometimes just joke. “He’s going to be fantastic. He’s going to bring home the bacon,” he said while signing an order to make Mike Huckabee ambassador to Israel. “Even though bacon isn’t too big in Israel.” This remark was a down-the-middle jest, and anyone who tried to make a scandal of it would embarrass themselves — a trap Democrats repeatedly fell into in the early years of Trump’s political career.
In significant part, the experience of spending the last 10 years watching Trump run for president, be president or monetize his past presidency has been the experience of watching other people make the mistake of taking his frivolous remarks at face value. Feeling superior to such people is basically the core of his appeal, if your taxable income is less than $400,000 a year. Trump’s ability to consistently deliver proof that people widely regarded as smart didn’t get it was his main advantage during the 2016 election, when his irresponsible, hateful or simply dishonest statements became occasions for him and his supporters to look authentic compared to a stodgy and pretentious establishment.
From there, the problem of how to interpret Trump only became more vexing, particularly for those outside his base. The growing national realization that Trump should be taken “seriously but not literally,” as journalist Salena Zito put it in 2016, laid the groundwork for a second kind of experience, in which the president says something most observers assume is a joke that turns out to be sincere. His talk of mass deportations, for example, seemed like mere rhetoric for several years (deportations during the first Trump administration did not exceed levels under President Barack Obama) and then abruptly became real during his second term, when social media was flooded with videos of masked ICE agents pulling people into unmarked vans.
Knowing that this kind of thing can happen keeps the first-order Trump experience — that of mistaking his loose talk for genuine policy proposals — maddeningly fresh. His plan to take control of Gaza, expel its Palestinian population and redevelop the area as a resort property appeared to be one such surprise-I-meant-it statement, at least for a while. No one thought his idea for a real-estate deal based on ethnic cleansing was serious, and then we experienced a few days of queasy reevaluation when he was posting videos about it and treating it as an actual plan. Then he never talked about it again.
The Gaza Riviera situation provided a test case for another disorienting experience, in which Trump himself seems not to have made up his mind, implying he is caught in the same will-he-or-won’t-he uncertainty he regularly inflicts on the rest of us.
Earlier this year, we got this third variety of Trump speech experience in his promise to enact massive tariffs on nearly every other country. It sounded like the usual bluster at first, but then he was actually doing it, to the panic of financial markets and neoliberal economists. Some of those tariff threats have since been walked back; others have been redoubled, while a 30-percent tax on goods from China has already gone into effect — a series of false starts and surprise follow-throughs that have made it impossible for investors to guess what conditions might apply to international trade in the future. Perhaps these reversals were a clever ploy to bring complacent partners to the negotiating table, or perhaps Trump genuinely wasn’t sure about his own trade policy. Only he knows for sure.
It is worth noting that this process of saying it, walking it back and then actually doing it materially benefited the president, in that it likely discouraged members of Congress and other interested parties from mounting a legal challenge to his authority to impose tariffs in the first place. After Israel attacked Iran, Trump’s announcement that he would take two weeks to decide how to respond worked in a similar way: Debate over an issue with the potential to split his coalition was forestalled while he (perhaps really, perhaps only ostensibly) waited to make up his mind, and then he acted suddenly, before intra-Republican conflict had a chance to begin in earnest.
I call attention to this phenomenon because I want to rule out the theory that Trump has some kind of personality disorder that prevents him from knowing when he means something and when he doesn’t. A wise clinician once told me that it’s not a disability if it works to your advantage. While I believe that, like Royal Tenenbaum, the president occasionally says something and then realizes it was true, he generally knows when he is lying, joking, bluffing or riffing to see what sticks, as well as when he is speaking sincerely and when he is giving the impression of one but actually doing the other. And his awareness creates an information asymmetry that works to his advantage.
This advantage should be familiar to anyone who has ever been in a bad relationship with someone who was quote-unquote funny. The husband who calls his wife fat and then complains she can’t take a joke is an archetypal instance of this phenomenon. By framing his remarks as a joke, he creates space to say mean things without having to take responsibility for them. If he said sincerely, “I want you to lose weight,” he would open the floor to his wife’s critique of his own appearance, a conversation over which he might rapidly lose control. By making “jokes” that are exaggerated versions of what he actually means, he enjoys the advantages of hassling his wife about her weight while avoiding the costs, or at least deferring them. Eventually she will leave or install Tinder, but until then he can evade the consequences of mistreating her by insisting he was only kidding.
The recently popular “TACO” acronym can be read as one misguided attempt to cope with the psychological fallout of this dynamic. The claim that “Trump Always Chickens Out,” which started as an investment strategy and became a taunt, is seductive but reflects a longing for certainty that is simply not available. It’s no good to assume that nothing the president says will actually happen, because historically some of it has. The false sense of wisdom TACO encourages might simply be the next phase of our training.
Trump has long made his plans for the presidency a kind of state secret. During his third campaign, he told a town hall in Iowa that he wouldn’t be a dictator, “other than day one.” CNN uploaded its video segment on this remark to YouTube with the title “Donald Trump jokes about acting like a ‘dictator.’” Six months into his second term, he has ignored court orders to return residents deported to foreign prisons and remarked that “homegrown” criminals are next.
Now his last election is behind him, maybe. On March 30 he told NBC News he might seek a third term, then told Meet the Press five weeks later that he wouldn’t. Americans who may want to act on or at least think seriously about this information are faced with the daunting task of determining in which case, if either, he was just talking. It is the kind of thing he says, after all. Whether it is the kind of thing he means is beyond what any of us could pretend to know.
