It went something like: "Trump's opponents take him literally but not seriously. Trump's voters take him seriously but not literally." I think if you actually go back and look at what he did since 2016, you realize that taking him both literally and seriously is the right approach. The things he says he'll do either come to fruition or someone else stops him from doing them. He got talked off the ledge a lot of the time by his minders the first term, but that doesn't mean he didn't seriously want to do some crazy stuff. There were plenty of reports leading into 2020 that he had been convinced to wait until after the election to pull the US out of NATO because it would hurt his reelection chances. By all accounts, when he gets talked off the ledge it's usually about his own political interests, not about what is good for the country. That just isn't how he thinks.