During the 2016 election, 8 million years ago, there was a big debate about whether we should take the many outrageous things President Donald Trump said seriously or literally, or both, or neither. Somehow, even as Trump’s rhetoric regularly attains new heights of ridiculousness, that debate is still relevant. And too many of us are still getting it dangerously wrong.

The latest example, which could well be obsolete by the time you read this, is Trump’s promise that every U.S. adult will get a $5,000 government check if voters agree to let Republicans keep control of Congress this November — a pledge he made during Republicans’ first-ever midterms convention Wednesday night. Immediately, America’s punditry scrambled for their law books and spreadsheets to assay this promise’s legality and fiscal practicality.

Why did they even bother? Yes, its legality is questionable. But even if it’s not technically legal, it would still be “legal,” according to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in, oh, pick a case over the past couple of years. As for the question of whether a promise worth $1.2 trillion, or more than the annual cost of Medicare, is fiscally prudent? Come on, man, we’re $40 trillion in debt. Anyway, Congress would ultimately have to make this folly a reality, and that’s just not going to happen. They have already passed on paying “dividends” using the revenue Trump’s tariffs extracted from American consumers.

But the very fact that this idea has been the subject of earnest discussion for the past several hours makes it at least enough of a reality to be dangerous.

I can’t read Trump’s mind, thank God. But it’s easy enough to guess that his goal Wednesday night wasn’t to spark an intellectual debate about the merits of a $5,000 dividend or the intricacies of campaign finance law. More likely, it was to distract everybody, however briefly, from his many spectacular failures, all of which explain why his Republican Party faces the risk of a generational wipeout in November.

And it worked! Considerable time and brainpower has been wasted on a policy proposal that was no more serious than promising every voter a free unicorn. Worse, there is now some non-zero cohort of Americans who, having seen lawmakers and policy experts scratch their chins about this on the local news or Fox or TikTok or wherever, will be convinced that Trump plans to personally write them a check for $5,000 if they vote Republican.

The examples of this are legion, and they grow by the day. When Trump renames things on the map, it’s not because of a lifelong interest in cartography. He is the class clown who, once he discovers that a bit gets a laugh, will hammer that bit again and again until it’s dead. Gulf of America got people riled up. Lake of America did too. How about New America? Trump Strait? Puerto Trumpo? Anything to make you not think for five minutes about the implications of a self-harming trade war with our closest neighbor, ally and trading partner. Or about how Trump Strait was actually functioning just fine before the self-harming war-war with Iran.

True, Trump has not invaded Greenland or made Canada the 51st state, and he never will. But the whole world spent a lot of time talking about both things happening. Meanwhile, Apple Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc., two of the wealthiest corporations in history, have meekly changed their map apps to honor his power to occasionally command the federal government to take him both seriously and literally.

Ironically, there’s still a theory out there that the Iran war itself was nothing but a distraction from the Epstein files. Maybe, maybe not. But if one were to try crafting a unified theory of Trump’s presidencies, you’d have to include the Himalayas of evidence that he has simply been winging it all along, with one ill-considered diversion after another, to varying degrees of destructiveness. The consequences are an America growing sicker, poorer, angrier, more scientifically and technologically backward and more isolated from whatever’s left of the free world by the day.

One of Trump’s favorite books is reportedly Norman Vincent Peale’s "The Power of Positive Thinking," and it has personally served him well. All he has to do is think something out loud and it becomes manifest to some degree or another. But that’s only because so many of us let it happen. Approval polls and the flop sweat increasingly dampening Trump’s brow suggest the consequences are finally catching up with this magical power. The thing we need to take most seriously about him now is our opportunity to free ourselves of his toxic hold on our reality.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

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