Taking Trump neither seriously nor literally

There is a messy battle over Trump’s choice of Treasury Secretary, with Howard Lutnick being backed by Elon and RFK Jr. and enough said. The scary thing is that this is what passes for the “normal” candidate:

Bessent has defended Trump’s agenda on television and in recent op-eds. After some of his critics argued to Trump’s advisers that Bessent hadn’t sufficiently signaled support for the president-elect’s pledge to impose a series of stiff tariffs, the longtime investor wrote an op-ed for Fox News praising them.

“For months, economic commentators parroted the Harris campaign’s misleading talking point that tariffs are a ‘sales tax,’ ” Bessent wrote this week, pushing back on concerns that tariffs will raise prices for consumers. “Like much of economists’ conventional wisdom, this view is fundamentally incorrect.”

The “mainstream” candidate for Treasury has to write op-eds lying about how tariffs won’t increase consumer prices, even though the whole point of protective tariffs is to raise consumer prices. The stock market is in retreat after an initial post-election boost, and I suspect one reason is that some investors are begging to figure out that Trump really means it when he says he wants a massively inflationary and disruptive across-the-board tariff policy. The thing about elections is that all sales are final.

Another example of how Trump’s coalition management is dependent on the combination of his dishonesty and its tendency to make some of his supporters assume that he only means it when he’s saying stuff they like:

Lobbyists expecting a more conventional pick to lead the government’s $3 trillion health agency than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the brash contrarian President-elect Donald Trump named on Thursday to take charge, are plotting how to stop the Senate from confirming him.

I can understand low-information voters not understanding what they were getting but how can professional lobbyists be this clueless?