Trump Promised Disaster. His Supporters Didn’t Believe Him.

The sense of dread from some corners of the Trump-supporting world as he carries out what he said he’d carry out—and with predictably dire results—is the sorry consequence of smart people talking themselves into drawing the wrong conclusion from the fact that America mostly survived Trump’s first term.

Most politicians don’t follow through on their campaign promises, but Trump very much is. That’s a problem for America, and for the world, because what he promised during his campaign was to remove constitutional limits, rule as an autocrat, break the economy, and upend the global order.

Now, lots of people who supported him in the election are freaking out. Not everyone, of course. His support is still there. But from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Wall Street Bets Reddit, there’s a growing sense of “Oh, shit.”

The disconnect here, between what Trump said and what many of his supporters thought he’d do, only makes sense if those supporters didn’t believe him. If they thought, Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll impose ruinous tariffs, but he won’t actually. Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll tear America out of its place of global leadership and instead make it a vassal state of his buddy Putin, but he won’t actually. Sure, he keeps telling us he’ll destroy the federal government and the constitutional system with it, without a clear plan to meaningfully replace any of it beyond a massive tool to carry out revenge against those he thinks wronged him, but he won’t actually.

The easy response—“I didn’t believe he’d do it”—is to proclaim the incredulity a sign of stupidity. Of course he’d do it. Every sign pointed to him doing it the moment he was sworn in. Just as the easy response to why working-class Americans, dependent on federal jobs, Social Security, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration, would vote for a guy who was promising to take it all away is to say, “Man, those guys just didn’t know anything.” And there’s some truth to the stupidity and the ignorance.

But I think something else was going on for a lot of them. Namely, they misread Trump’s first term in a way that they shouldn’t have, but in a way that isn’t entirely irrational, either.

The fact is, Trump said he’d do a lot of bad things in his first term, and then largely didn’t. Or he started to, or announced he was going to start to, and then backtracked or gave up at the first resistance. Or he implemented some de minimis version of the bad thing that failed to achieve much harm. Or he did some, but definitely not all.

Smart people who wanted to talk themselves into supporting Trump concluded from this that he didn’t mean those stupid things, and so he didn’t mean them this time around, either. He’s just a bullshitter, and the thing about bullshitters is that most of what they say is bullshit. So let it wash over you, while telling yourself that a second Trump term will look much like the first. There’s the informed and engaged voter version of that, which tallies the list of first-time campaign promises and the actual policies his administration carried out and draws the comforting conclusion. Then there’s the uninformed and disengaged version, where low-information voters had a vague sense of “prices were lower in 2019” and so voted for what they imagined, in a haze of ignorance and misunderstanding, would be a return to 2019.

But what the first weeks of the second Trump administration have made clear is that he probably wasn’t bullshitting the first time around, just as he wasn’t last fall, but that structural barriers existed to mitigate the bad stuff in Trump 1.0 that have been circumvented in Trump 2.0.

Namely, Trump 1.0 didn’t expect to win.

The first Trump administration wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been because it had relatively normal people in positions of power, who responded to incentives in a relatively normal way and had moral features within relatively normal parameters. Some were stupid and evil, yes, but plenty weren’t. And that made it harder for Trump to get done all the stupid and evil things that appeal to Trump.

For the second campaign, though, his people put in the work to remove those barriers. They made a plan, much of it set out in Project 2025, to hit the ground running in a way that would overwhelm the system, take advantage of its weak points, and ensure the stupid and evil stuff would be fully inflicted this time.

So the shock from the corners that ought to have known better really is that they thought there’d be adults in the room, because there were adults in the room before. They thought Trump would talk about burning the economy down, but he wouldn’t have the opportunity to light the match. They were, in other words, paying attention to what Trump was saying and assuming it was bullshit instead of paying attention to what the people around him were saying and taking it seriously.

And now it’s too late, and it turns out everyone was telling the truth.