In one of the better stories written about Donald Trump’s core base of supporters during the 2016 campaign, the Atlantic’s Salena Zito observed that while the national media had a tendency to take Trump literally without taking his presidential ambitions seriously, his fans did just the reverse: They took him seriously but not literally.

As a point about the state of mind of Trump supporters, Zito is absolutely correct. But one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, the media-savvy billionaire Peter Thiel, took Zito’s turn of phrase and inverted its meaning. He said that the media misunderstands Donald Trump by taking him literally rather than seriously.

What we’ve seen thus far of Trump’s transition, however, shows just the opposite. The national press’s Trump coverage did to an extent err by not taking him seriously enough. But it also failed in exactly the same way many Trump supporters failed. The celebrity candidate seemed so much more emotionally invested in his rallies than his policy proposals that not nearly enough attention was paid to the literal commitments he was making and what they literally said.

But throughout history and across various countries, the best guide to how politicians will govern is to pay attention to their policy promises. And Trump’s transition so far suggests that this is an area where he will be typical. Like any president, he won’t accomplish 100 percent of what he promised to do. But he’ll make a good faith effort at the vast majority of it, and probably succeed in many cases.

We should, in other words, have taken Trump both seriously and literally.

Jeff Sessions shows Trump is really serious about immigration

I’m from New York, so the Trump supporters who I know are disproportionately New Yorkers. They’re the kind of politically moderate whites who voted for Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki in the 1990s, but also for Bill Clinton and Chuck Schumer. Some of them work in real estate. And like real estate guys everywhere, they think a broad crackdown on Latin American immigration would be a terrible idea — simultaneously crunching their workforce and reducing demand for their product. Since Trump himself was a New York real estate guy, they simply assume that he agrees with them about this as just bubba bait — exactly the same as how Trump obviously isn’t a sincere social conservative on questions of sexual morality.

And yet Trump’s very first Cabinet appointment was Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

Sessions is most infamous with the liberal public for his past history of racist statements and his broad brush opposition to civil rights causes. But in the halls of Congress, Sessions is known as a very serious, hard-working, and committed opponent of immigration to the United States. He led the charge against George W. Bush’s attempt at immigration reform in 2007 and again against the Obama-era effort in 2013. And importantly, Sessions isn’t just opposed to some hazy notion of “amnesty” — he’s a full spectrum immigration hawk, who opposes both legal and illegal immigration of both less-skilled and more-skilled workers.

Trump’s first 100 days agenda features a Sessions-esque promise to look into “visa abuse” and the three-person landing team at the Department of Justice includes Ronald Tenpas, who has expertise in eminent domain lawsuits pertaining to the seizure of land for the purposes of building border security barriers.

Trump’s immigration policy, in other words, is shaping up to be exactly the immigration policy he ran on. One that was written for him largely by former Sessions staffers and their allies in the immigration enforcement unions. None of this necessarily means that Trump will succeed in constructing a 50-foot concrete wall across the entire border — the congressional and logistical roadblocks are considerable — but he’s prepping to take a real shot at doing what he can.

Trump has a very Trumpy White House team

Gen. Michael Flynn was a very well-regarded intelligence officer until his success in the field earned him a job in Washington as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. At the DIA, he clashed with his peers in the leadership of the Intelligence Community and failed to convince the higher-ups he was right. He alienated the top brass in the uniformed military and developed a bad reputation for abusive behavior toward his subordinates. He got fired, and after that, seems to have gotten a little loopy — becoming an extremely trenchant Obama critic and occasional paid agent of the Russian government who developed views way outside the consensus zone of either Obama or his main Republican Party critics.

In short, he seems like a terrible choice to serve as national security adviser, a job whose main role is to coordinate the interagency process and that absolutely requires you to be able to not make everyone you work with hate you.

But Flynn’s foreign policy views — soft on Russia, extraordinarily harsh on Islam, hawkish without being neoconservative — are exactly the ones Trump articulated on the campaign trail. What’s more, Trump did not hide the fact that he held Flynn in high esteem; he relied on him constantly for counsel and promoted him as a major spokesperson.

So of course he’ll be joining Trump in the White House. As will Steve Bannon, a media impresario who’s spent years mainstreaming white nationalism and who has a poor relationship with elected leaders of the Republican Party. Bannon was the CEO of Trump’s campaign, which also mainstreamed white nationalism and had a poor relationship with elected leaders of the Republican Party, so there’s no reason for anything to change.

On economics and conflicts of interest Trump is doing what he said

On the level of symbolism and atmospherics, Trump campaigned as a Rust Belt populist who was sharply critical of the global banking elite. He went so over the top in his painting of lurid conspiracy theories about bankers that the main question we discussed in the media was about Trump’s trafficking in anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Tuesday afternoon, however, Treasury Department sources told me that they’d finally heard from Trump’s transition, and their point man on financial regulation was going to be Alex Pollack of the American Enterprise Institute. AEI is a very finance-friendly mainstream conservative think tank, and Pollack is neither an anti-Semite nor a dedicated foe of the global banking elite. His view is that the Obama Treasury Department has been regulating gigantic “systemically significant” financial institutions too harshly, and that the regulatory apparatus that supervises them should be dismantled.

This will probably disappoint many of Trump’s supporters who took his antics seriously. But anyone who read his policy statements and took them literally would know that Trump has always been proposing a bonanza of tax cuts and deregulation for bankers.

Taking Trump literally would also have helped prepare voters for the unprecedented pile of corruption and conflicts of interest that are currently surrounding Trump’s business interests. Trump was only rarely asked about this on the campaign trail, but his campaign always said that Trump would continue to own a sprawling network of opaque privately held companies and that he would turn their day-to-day management over to his children. That is and always was a setup for an appalling level of corruption, but it’s exactly what he said he would do.

Taking Trump seriously but not literally meant assuming that, faced with the massive burdens of the presidency, Trump would, naturally, come up with a more serious solution. But that turns out to have been wishful thinking.

You should always take politicians literally

The view that you should take politicians’ formal campaign promises very seriously is something that very few voters or journalists believe. But it’s validated by extensive research.

And it’s particularly true of presidents, because United States government is enormous. There are more than 4,000 political appointees in the executive branch and many career public servants doing important policy work. The president cannot oversee an operation of that size based on private conversations about what he “really” wants any more than he can privately convey his “real” opinion to the thousands of congressional staffers whose work also crucially impacts his legacy.

The literal text of a president’s positions is not the only means through which the president’s ideas are conveyed to the executive branch, but it is the simplest, broadest, and most effective means of doing so. The literal stated agenda is also a powerful tool in any kind of interagency dialogue or collaborative meeting. Anyone can say they have divined the true intentions of the Oval Office dictating what the policy “really” is, but only a handful of people would be remotely credible in trying to pull it off.

Pointing to the alignment of your proposed course of action with a literal policy statement, by contrast, is a pretty good argument: “We’re doing this because it’s what we said we were going to do” helps bring career staffers along, and it’s a good explanation to give to curious reporters.

Life is inherently unpredictable. And Trump is more unpredictable than your average politician. But the best information about how he will govern is still the literal text of his formal proposals. It’s true that this is a bad way to understand what his supporters like about him, but it’s the best way to understand what he will do.

Watch: It’s on America’s institutions to check Trump