As the 2016 presidential campaign neared its final throes, the journalist Salena Zito offered an elegant explanation of the chasm between the political-media class, which beheld Donald Trump as an unelectable clown, and those Americans propelling him toward victory. “[T]he press takes him literally, but not seriously,” she wrote; “his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

As a means of accommodating Trump’s unusual traits as a politician, however, the seriously/literally construct became inoperative on January 21, with the utterance of the words, “I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear . . . ” Any president, even this one, must be taken seriously and literally.