Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page called it “the most pithy, profound and requoted explanation of the many who have tried to explain the president-elect’s surprising success.” While FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver deemed it “a runaway front-runner in the ‘wrongest idea of 2016’ derby,” Fox News’s Brit Hume celebrated it as the “Smartest observation of the campaign.” I’m referring, of course, to a line from a September article in The Atlantic by Salena Zito: “When [Trump] makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

This became a refrain not only among Trump’s prominent supporters, from Corey Lewandowski to Peter Thiel, but among many in the media cognoscenti. This was understandable, to a degree, given Trump’s unorthodox candidacy, for which the press had little frame of reference. Trump had no political experience whatsoever, was wildly unpredictable, and was well-documented as a pathological liar, so inevitably there was uncertainty about how much his campaign rhetoric could be trusted. But Zito’s observation has not aged well since the election. “This seriously-not-literally thing is a great analytical insight into how then-candidate Trump communicated with his supporters,” National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg wrote in December. “But it is fairly ridiculous hogwash as a prescription for how to treat an actual president, or president-elect, of the United States.”

And as it turns out, Trump has spent the first few weeks of his presidency doing exactly what he said he’d do. “Almost all of the actions that Trump has undertaken,” Silver wrote, “are consistent with statements and policy positions he issued repeatedly on the campaign trail and during the presidential transition.” In other words, Trump is keeping his promises to his base. That’s both a relief and an annoyance to many Republicans in Congress and the conservative establishment more broadly: relief that he isn’t, as the NeverTrump camp feared, reverting to the liberal stances that he held for most of his life, especially on social issues; and annoyance that he does indeed want to ban many Muslim immigrants and build an insanely expensive wall along the entire U.S. border with Mexico.

Despite their many reprimands of Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail, Republicans are largely playing along with the president, still hoping their Faustian bargain with him results in legislative victories. It’s turning out, in other words, that whereas Trump should have been taken seriously and literally all along, Republicans should not have been—and still shouldn’t be—taken seriously or literally.

After last year’s election, some Democrats—notably Senator Chuck Schumer—expressed hope that because Trump was fundamentally non-ideological, the minority party might be able to work with him on certain issues, such as infrastructure spending. But three weeks into his presidency, Trump is making it clear that he’s going to pay off his die-hard supporters by trying to keep his most extreme campaign promises. In addition to the executive orders for a border wall and Muslim immigration ban, he has also signed executive orders related to repealing Obamacare, freezing federal hiring, resurrecting the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, implementing a lobbying ban, and pursuing a tough law enforcement agenda. And by nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Trump fulfilled his promise to social conservatives that he would give them a justice in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia.