These writers tend to suggest that the people who feel such fear are to blame for their own weakness, that they’re “special snowflakes” — to use a favorite phrase of these emailers — or that people who are afraid are dumb enough to expect that they’ll never face pain, or opposition or setbacks. These writers encourage the people I’m writing about — and by extension me — to buck up, to get over the election results and to move on to … well, whatever it is, they never really say. I’ve responded to many of these emails directly, but because they’re so numerous as to constitute a trope, it seemed worth addressing the logic that underlies so many of these notes.

I suspect a lot of the people who email me notes that fall into this camp took Donald Trump seriously but not literally, as Salena Zito put it in the Atlantic in September. The phrase stuck because it was a sharp way to describe the way Trump voters responded to his emotional message without allowing his many falsehoods and more radical promises to call that connection into question. By contrast, Zito suggested, journalists took Trump literally but not seriously: Reporters focused on Trump’s loose relationship with the facts and his norm-breaking while refusing to believe that he could really appeal to anyone.

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Each of these positions is a strategy for managing emotions. If, prior to the election, you were horrified by Trump’s disregard for the intelligence community, his lack of interest in the actual workings of government or his invitations to the Russian government to hack Hillary Clinton’s email, but you didn’t believe that he could possibly be elected president of the United States, then you didn’t have to worry about the possible consequences of a Trump administration. By contrast, if you don’t believe that Trump actually thinks President Obama was born overseas or that he truly intends to build a wall, or deport millions of people, or create a registry of Muslims, then you don’t have to weigh those possible consequences against your own attraction to his message.

I don’t doubt that most of the people who have sent me these emails genuinely believe that a lot of Americans, particularly those younger than them, need to toughen up. The world’s a big place, and some of the people walking through it are bruised by any idea or unkind word that brushes up against them. But just as it’s an emotional management strategy to take Trump seriously but not literally, conflating the silliest sensitivities with serious threats to a person or a community’s material well-being is a way to deny that anyone is in actual danger that they can’t get themselves out of simply by getting tougher and more determined.

But you can’t prevent yourself from being deported, or being placed on a registry, or having a mob of harassers sent after you simply by showing grit. And while it’s certainly reasonable to weigh the threats of a Trump administration rationally, that’s not the same thing as suggesting that his presidency won’t have a real impact on people’s lives.

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The readers who write to me in anger about what they perceive as the oversensitivity of others believe that the people who fear Trump’s presidency naively long for a world in which they’ll never be injured or marginalized. These writers are, themselves, exhibiting a different kind of naivete. Some Trump voters, to be sure, seem to revel in the prospect of political revenge. I think many others, though, want to believe it’s possible to get all the benefits that a Trump administration promised without incurring any costs. The fears other people feel about Trump’s election intrude on that fantasy of change without consequences.