On Monday morning, Axios’s Mike Allen blasted out his early morning email with the subject line: “Scoop: Trump’s retaliation plan.” It seems that Republicans, after failing to find actual evidence to support their vibes-based impeachment of Joe Biden, are plotting how to prosecute the president and his family if Donald Trump returns to power. “One Trump ally argued that there is precedent for a second Trump administration to investigate and prosecute the Bidens: the current federal charges against Trump,” Axios reported.

Let’s pause for a moment from today’s latest campaign “scoop” to make something clear: None of this is normal. None of this is how American democracy is supposed to work. Trump is not a normal candidate, despite how the media often covers him. He has autocratic ambitions, having told supporters, “I am your retribution,” and has promised to be a “dictator”—a dictator!—on “day one” in office.

Trump is a presidential candidate unlike any other, just as he was a president unlike any we had before. We have never had a president who didn’t accept the peaceful transfer of power and encouraged rioters (“will be wild”) to storm the US Capitol. We have never had a president who was impeached twice, including for trying to incite said insurrection. We have never had a former president who faces 88 charges across four criminal cases, and is scheduled to be in court next week for a hush money trial. (This is also a person who is now opposed by many of the people who worked closest to him the last time around; even former vice president Mike Pence won’t endorse Trump.) The situation we’re in, and will be in for the next seven months, is without precedent. And there is no handbook for US media outlets covering the rise of authoritarianism on its own shores.

In the makeup room at 30 Rock, I joked with another MSNBC guest that we could share a cell at Guantánamo Bay. I was kidding of course, because no one takes what Kash Patel said about jailing members of the media seriously, but why don’t we? Patel told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast that, if Trump is elected in November, they “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.”

Trump’s allies will brush off some of his more outrageous and incendiary rhetoric as jokes, but usually that’s a cover when he says something that is so wildly beyond the normal political discourse (like “Russia, if you’re listening” or how police should “rough” up suspects). But as I’ve argued before, the media should take Trump literally and seriously. And should go for key allies, like Patel too.

Just think what Trump was capable of doing in his first term, from his family-separation policy for migrants to trying to get the president of Ukraine to investigate the Biden family. He also isn’t subtle; in 2015, he called for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” as a candidate and then, a week into office, enacted a travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries. Trump has called for an expanded travel ban to include Gaza if he’s elected, a vow that shouldn’t be dismissed.

What’s become abundantly clear this election cycle is that Trump has a very dark authoritarian vision for America if he gets back in office. In March, he “truthed” about how Liz Cheney, a Republican who tried to hold him accountable for inciting the January 6 insurrection, “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Members of the January 6 committee are taking Trump seriously, with Democratic representative Zoe Lofgren telling the Los Angeles Times, “If he intends to eliminate our constitutional system and start arresting his political enemies, I guess I would be on that list. One thing I did learn on the committee is to pay attention and listen to what Trump says, because he means it.”

Taking Trump literally and seriously doesn’t mean taking him credulously. One of the truths of autocrats is that they lie. As The Economist has noted, “the arsenal of deceit is highly effective at keeping malign leaders in power, which is perhaps why global democracy has been in retreat for the past decade.” That’s why the media needs to call a lie a lie, and not worry if doing so appears partisan, while making clear that Trump’s authoritarian agenda would mark a radical break from America as we know it. This isn’t just another normal presidential race.