In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 41% of people who describe themselves as “likely voters” agreed with the statement that “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.”

Do you agree? Are Americans who worry that the former president, the current Republican nominee to return to the White House, is too extreme after hearing some of his plans for a second administration worry warts who take his campaign speeches too literally?

That’s our Question of the Week for readers.

The candidate himself sometimes seems to acknowledge that what he says is merely rhetorical — for the sake of argument.

When asked about his saying that he would raise tariffs to 200% on some foreign imports, Trump told Fox News on Sunday, “I’m using that just as a figure. I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500, I don’t care.”

When the Times asked one former corporate CFO and supporter of the GOP ticket if he took that 200% figure literally, he said: “No. That’s the other thing. You’ve got to sometimes scare these other countries.”

One of the key elements of his recent campaign speeches is to say that he would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.”

Of which the same supporter says: “He may say things, and then it gets people all upset, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”

Do you agree with one longtime Republican pollster who says: “The normal rules just don’t apply to Donald Trump, and you’ve seen it time and again”? He says of many Trump supporters, according to his research on focus groups, that “people think he says things for effect, that he’s blustering, because that’s part of what he does, his shtick. They don’t believe that it’s actually going to happen.”

Is Trump just looking for a catchy sound bite when he says he would consider removing the United States from NATO or that he wants “one violent day of policing” to fight crime?

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