Washington (CNN) Following Donald Trump's massive upset last November, conventional wisdom settled on a simple concept to explain his victory: The media (and Democrats) took Trump literally but not seriously while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.

It was a concise way of understanding the Trump phenomenon -- and all of the cavalier, intemperate and downright nasty things he said during the campaign about, among others, Hillary Clinton, women, the party establishment and a variety of foreign leaders.

His supporters viewed all of it as Trump being Trump -- a showman putting on a show. They liked that he was willing to say whatever came into his mind, but they didn't expect him to actually, say, build a wall across the southern border and make Mexico pay for it.

The media and his opponents, on the other hand, took his rhetoric at face value and tried to extrapolate what that sort of approach might mean in a president. They never thought he'd get there, of course.

Which brings us to today or, more accurately, Tuesday afternoon when Trump said this in reaction to the news that North Korea had miniaturized a nuclear weapon : "They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before."

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