DETROIT — One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald 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.
The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of nonloyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.
There is, of course, evidence to the contrary. During Trump’s term in office, some of his autocratic rhetoric did become reality. He really did set in motion a Muslim ban; he really did order up investigations of his foes; he really did foment a mob when the election didn’t go his way. But in other instances he was stymied, and a lot of his strongman jaw-jaw remained just that.
That’s the way some of his voters think another term might go. It’s how they rationalize his rhetoric, by affording him a reverse benefit of the doubt. They doubt; he benefits.
On Thursday, inside a small music venue in downtown Detroit during the middle of the day, you could see this phenomenon playing out quite clearly.
Trump was there to address the Detroit Economic Club. Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama had all, in their respective days, come to Michigan to talk to this club, too.
There were a few hundred people there. They were not the sorts of people one encounters at a Trump rally. They weren’t construction workers or truck drivers or forklift operators; they carried business cards and had very active LinkedIn pages. They did not wear red hats or T-shirts with images of Trump’s bloodied face; they wore windowpane suit jackets and loafers and rather conspicuous cuff links.
They did not want to hear about “one really violent day” or about the deep state or the Marxists or the fascists or any of the other radical or antidemocratic visions that Trump describes in baroque detail at his rallies. They just wanted him to tell them that he would be good for business.
So, he did. For nearly two hours. There were rough edges in his remarks, and some talk of a stolen election, but mostly he made them feel content in their choice to vote for him. They chuckled at his self-deprecating wisecracks about his age, his body, his hair and his wealth. He talked about American muscle cars and regaled them with tales of how he went toe-to-toe with various world leaders and about his new buddy, Elon Musk. They cooed when he told them his daughter Tiffany was newly pregnant, and clapped when he said, however improbably, that he would work with Democrats to get stuff done. This was the version of Trump in which they (and their 401ks) wanted to believe.
They found it easy to tune out the other versions of him.
“I think the media blows stuff out of proportion for sensationalism,” said Mario Fachini, 40, of Detroit, who owns a book publishing company. His black hair was gelled back and he had on a boxy, black pinstriped suit with a gold pocket square peeking out.
Tom Pierce, 67, of Northville, Michigan, did not truly believe that Trump would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.” Even though that is pretty much the central promise of his campaign.
“He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” Pierce said, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”
Did Pierce, a former chief financial officer, believe Trump would actually levy a 200% tariff against certain companies? “No,” he said. “That’s the other thing. You’ve got to sometimes scare these other countries.” (Indeed. In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Trump said, “I’m using that just as a figure. I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500, I don’t care.”)
Pierce added, “He’s not perfect. And I don’t necessarily care for his personality, but I do like how we had peace and prosperity.”
That dynamic is one that Trump has had with voters ever since he stormed onto the political scene nine years ago, and it endures, even as his language has grown darker. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, 41% of likely voters agreed with the assessment that “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.”
“The normal rules just don’t apply to Donald Trump, and you’ve seen it time and again,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. Newhouse said he has found in his polling and focus groups that “people think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering, because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.”
But Trump and those around him have said a second term would be different, since he finally has a firm grip on his party, and because many of the roadblocks that slowed him down before have been pulverized. This is a key part of Vice President Kamala Harris’ pitch to voters. “Understand what it would mean if Donald Trump were back in the White House with no guardrails, because certainly we know now the court won’t stop him,” she said during their debate. “We know JD Vance is not going to stop him.”
Still, even some of Trump’s more hard-core supporters, the people who go to the rallies, wonder how far he can or will go. Hal Garrigues, a retired pilot who attended a Trump rally in Bozeman, Montana, this year said in a phone interview that he didn’t believe Trump would “go after” Biden or his family, “because, I mean, before he said the same crap about Hillary, and then he didn’t do anything.”
Garrigues did not think that Trump would take the United States out of NATO (“It’ll never happen”), nor did he worry about Trump’s fantasy of “one violent day” of policing. “Nah, that’s just a sound bite,” he said. “He’s not going to do that.”
“I think people have very thick shock absorbers when it comes to Donald Trump,” said Kellyanne Conway, the Republican pollster who served as a senior counselor to the former president. “People have a very good sense of sussing out rhetoric from reality.”
And yet, as president, much of Trump’s rhetoric did become reality. What he said Jan. 6, 2021 — “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — ultimately led to his impeachment for inciting insurrection.
In a new book by Bob Woodward, Gen. Mark Milley is quoted as saying the former president is “fascist to the core.” Milley is just one in a long line of top officials and military leaders who worked for Trump and then told tales afterward about having to constantly work to prevent him from acting out his most antidemocratic impulses.
In Detroit, Trump told a version of that reality that was not entirely different. He lamented how his first term in Washington had gone, admitted that he didn’t know much about the way the town worked, and that he had to rely on people he could not trust to carry out his wishes. “I now know the game a little better,” he said.
But he also seemed to be aware that there are many people who wonder about some of the words that come out of his mouth. Maybe some of those people were there in that very room. Maybe that’s why he went on a tangent about all the ways he thinks Democrats are screwing things up and then said, “You see, that’s the real threat to democracy — stupid people.”
The businesspeople began to clap.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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