"Strongman jaw-jaw" makes me laugh.
41 percent 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. Mr. Newhouse said that 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.”
[...]
During Mr. 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.
[...]
Mr. Trump [addressed] 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Trump describes in baroque detail at his rallies. They just wanted him to tell them that he would be good for business.
I mean yeah, that's not that weird I'm not a supporter but I don't believe most of that stuff either. The idea that libs don't get this is kind central to their not being able to convince these voters - their appeals to this-will-end-democracy maybe work for Dick Cheney (maybe) but mostly they make you sound like you're catastrophizing.
People are so top-down conditioned that they're gonna do it in a way that comports to their worldview, so for people for whom the rhetoric is just rhetoric will rationalize around that assumption, but there are absolutely people taking cues from this dweeb and moving in concert in a more direct and literal way.
I lived in texas for most of the trump admin, I saw it start to happen. Landed republicans got way more FYGM some of them went mask off with their bigoted shit, but a not small number of especially working class conservativs seemed to actually start frothing at the goddamn mouth so I dunno I think it's worthy of assuming that some % of the people listening to that dude are being very literal about this.