Members of Donald Trump’s inner circle understandably wish to interpret the election results as a mandate for the most extreme right-wing policies, which include conducting mass deportations and crushing their political enemies.

But how many Trump supporters think that’s what they voted for?

Many seem not to—persisting in their denial of not only Trump’s negative qualities and the extremism of his advisers, but the idea that he would implement policies they disagreed with. There were the day laborers who seemed to think that mass deportations would happen only to people they—as opposed to someone like the Trump adviser Stephen Miller—deemed criminals. There was the restaurant owner and former asylum seeker who told CNN that  deporting law-abiding workers “wouldn’t be fair,” and that Trump would not “throw [them] away; they don’t kick out, they don’t deport people that are family-oriented.” There are the pro-choice Trump voters who don’t believe that he will impose dramatic federal restrictions on abortion; the voters who support the Affordable Care Act but pulled the lever for the party that intends to repeal it.

This denial suggests that voting for Trump was not an endorsement of those things but a rebuke of an incumbent party for what voters saw as a lackluster economy. The consistent theme here is that Trump advisers have a very clear authoritarian and discriminatory agenda, one that many Trump voters don’t believe exists or, to the extent it does, will not harm them. That is remarkable, delusional, and frightening. But it is not a mandate.

[Read: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

During the last weeks of the campaign, when I was traveling in the South speaking with Trump voters, I encountered a tendency to deny easily verifiable negative facts about Trump. For example, one Trump voter I spoke with asked me why Democrats were “calling Trump Hitler.” The reason was that one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, the retired Marine general John Kelly, had relayed the story about Trump wanting “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” and saying that “Hitler did some good things.”

“Look back on the history of Donald Trump, whom they’re trying to call racist,” one Georgia voter named Steve, who declined to give his last name, told me. “If you ask somebody, ‘Well, what has he said that’s actually racist?,’ usually they can’t come up with one thing. They’ll say all kinds of things, and it’s like, ‘No, what?’ Just because the media says he’s racist doesn’t mean he’s racist.”

I found this extraordinary because the list of racist things that Trump has said and done this past year alone is long, including slandering Haitian immigrants and framing his former rival Kamala Harris as a DEI hire pretending to be Black. He made comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” and having “bad genes,” an unsubtle proxy for race. Trump’s very rise to the top of the Republican Party began when he became the main champion of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not really born in America.

This is consistent with Trump voters simply ignoring or disregarding facts about Trump that they don’t like. Democratic pollsters told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that “voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign.” Sargent added, “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.” One North Carolina Trump voter named Charlie, who also did not give me his last name, told me that he was frustrated by gas prices—comparing them with how low they’d been when he took a road trip in the final year of Trump’s first term. That year, energy prices were unexpectedly depressed by the pandemic.

Many Trump voters seemed to simply rationalize negative stories about him as manufactured by an untrustworthy press that was out to get him. This points to the effectiveness of right-wing media not only in presenting a positive image of Trump, but in suppressing negative stories that might otherwise change perceptions of him. And because they helped prevent several worst-case scenarios during Trump’s first term, Democrats may also be the victims of their own success. Many people may be inclined to see warnings of what could come to pass as exaggerations rather than real possibilities that could still occur.

[Read: The Trump believability gap]

Watching Trump “go from someone who’s beloved in the limelight to someone who’s absolutely abhorred by anybody … in the media is completely—I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make any sense to me,” another Georgia Trump voter, who declined to provide his name, said to me. “And generally, the things that don’t make sense are solved by the simplest answers.”

This speaks to an understated dynamic in Trump’s victory: Many people who voted for him believe he will do only the things they think are good (such as improve the economy) and none of the things they think are bad (such as act as a dictator)—or, if he does those bad things, the burden will be borne by other people, not them. This is the problem with a political movement rooted in deception and denial; your own supporters may not like it when you end up doing the things you actually want to do.

All of this may be moot if Trump successfully implements an authoritarian regime that is unaccountable to voters—in many illiberal governments, elections continue but remain uncompetitive by design. If his voters are allowed to, some may change their minds once they realize Trump’s true intentions. Still, the election results suggest that if the economy stays strong, for the majority of the electorate, democracy could be a mere afterthought.

The central contradiction of Donald Trump’s reelection is this: He owes his victory to the fact that millions of voters appear to have seen him as the stability candidate who would usher in a return to pre-COVID normalcy. But he has put forward a second-term agenda that would be far more radical and disruptive than anything he accomplished while in office.

To much of the country, the notion of Trump as the return-to-normal candidate is laughable. His first term involved two impeachments, intense national protests, a flailing pandemic response, and, as a capstone, a violent attempt to defy the results of the 2020 election. But many voters, perhaps most, see things differently in retrospect. In a New York Times poll conducted toward the end of Trump’s first term, just 39 percent of voters said that the country had been better off since he took office; in a version of the poll conducted in April of this year, nearly 50 percent did. An NBC poll conducted weeks before last Tuesday’s election similarly found that a plurality of voters believed that Trump’s policies had helped their families and that Biden’s had hurt them.

In 2016, Trump voters wanted change—disruptive, confrontational change—and believed that their man would deliver it. They described Trump as a “middle finger” to the establishment and “a wrecking ball” aimed at the status quo. Eight years later, voters once again overwhelmingly said they want change, but the kind of change was very different: a reversion to the perceived better times of the first Trump administration, before inflation and a border crisis took hold under Joe Biden. “In my assessment of the dynamics of this election, what I see and hear is an electorate that seems to be craving stability in the economy, in their finances, at the border, in their schools and in the world,” the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote last year, summarizing the findings of her frequent focus-group discussions. Trump seized on this dynamic, encouraging voters to remember how good they had it when he was in office.  

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

“Less than four years ago our border was secure, inflation was nowhere to be seen, the world was at peace, and America was strong and respected,” he declared at a rally earlier this year.

Even as Trump promised a return to happier times, however, he campaigned on an agenda that seems bound to generate conflict and chaos. His promise to carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history” would involve law-enforcement raids at workplaces and homes across the country. His plan to purge the federal government of insufficiently loyal bureaucrats would leave agencies struggling to carry out their basic tasks. His proposal to impose heavy tariffs on all imports would raise consumer prices and could trigger a series of retaliatory trade wars. Some of his ideas, such as directing the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents and inviting the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptic to help set federal health policy, depart so flagrantly from established political norms that the consequences are impossible to predict. Given all that, how did Trump win over so many voters who just want things to go back to normal?

One answer is that even Trump’s own voters don’t think he’ll act on many of his proposals. As my colleague David A. Graham wrote last month, “Trump exists in a strange zone where voters hear what he’s saying and then largely discount it, perhaps as a result of his past dissembling, or perhaps because the ideas just seem too extreme to be real.” In one poll taken right before the election, just two-thirds of his supporters said the former president was “serious” about mass deportations; only 38 percent and 21 percent, respectively, said the same about using the military against U.S. citizens and prosecuting his political opponents, both of which Trump has said he would do. When asked why they don’t take Trump’s proposals seriously, voters tend to give the same answer: The media made many similar warnings last time, heading into Trump’s first term, and things never got all that bad. The economy kept humming; the Affordable Care Act never got repealed; the U.S. didn’t get into any major wars.

It’s true that the most dire predictions for the first Trump presidency never materialized. But there’s a very specific reason for that: The institutions and people surrounding Trump prevented him from acting on his worst impulses. The courts struck down more than 70 of Trump’s policies in his first three years alone. The ACA was narrowly saved by a handful of moderate Republicans, most prominently John McCain. Trump’s own vice president refused to negate the 2020 election results. Trump’s staffers repeatedly thwarted his more bizarre ideas and musings. “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job,” a senior national-security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2019.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

In this sense, the “deep state” that Trump blames for his problems deserves some of the credit for his reelection. The limited damage of Trump’s first term reflected an entire apparatus of staffers, civil servants, and institutions that prevented him from doing everything he wanted to do.

Things will likely be different this time. The Supreme Court recently held that presidents are immune from prosecution for anything that qualifies as an “official act,” which it hinted is a broad category. The Republican congressional caucus has mostly purged itself of anyone willing to defy Trump. And Trump’s inner circle is focused on staffing the government with loyalists. The guardrails are largely gone.

“I will govern by a simple motto,” Trump proclaimed in his victory speech last week: “Promises made, promises kept.” Americans often fault politicians for not keeping their word. Swing voters who opted to give Trump a second chance might soon find themselves raising the opposite complaint.