"But taken literally it would mean we are going to turn off the pumps. Allow the dikes to melt away. Decommission the Maeslantkering. That’s the literal meaning of what you’ve written here. Which I know is not what you mean. But you are just handing the right wing an opportunity to make fun of you. ‘Look, he’s just virtue signaling, he doesn’t actually mean a word of this.’ So . . . perhaps here?" She placed a recently manicured fingernail, still redolent of volatile organic solvents, on a phrase in the text.