https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/10/trump-derangement-syndrome-spreads-part-ii/
A Florida woman took a huge loss rather than sell her home to a Trump supporter, yet one more indication how deep the lunacy has spread. After Obama, when the Left thought it had won once and for all, bitter disappointment has spawned a sweeping, often violent and ominous hysteria.
Before my first collection of instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome had been published (Quadrant, September 2018) it had already been overtaken by a mass of new material, so virulent and widespread as to give the impression that the US and the Western world are in a kind of low-grade civil war.
The Trump Presidency has exposed deep and hitherto unsuspected levels of corruption, perhaps mere self-seeking, perhaps part of a larger, more treasonous agenda, in the “higher” Washington political class, including much of the media and parts of the Department of Justice and the FBI. Watching the current US political news brings to mind a passage in C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel That Hideous Strength: “Here was a world of plot within plot, crossing and double-crossing, of lies and graft and stabbing in the back … and a contemptuous guffaw for the fool who lost the game.”
Trump, for all his faults, appears to be standing against this, ripping up the established rules, speaking plain and simple truths—as he promised, draining the swamp—which accounts for some of the frenzied attacks on him. But there is more to it. Trump Derangement Syndrome appears in people who have no stake in the power game and when it is even contrary to their own interests.
It is easy to believe that a large number of Trump’s enemies, Republicans as well as Democrats, for all the loud professions of patriotism, are really opposed to him because they want his anti-Left program to fail. Their greatest and most permanent and decisive victory would be to have Trump impeached, notwithstanding the fact that more than two years of frantic searching has failed to discover any grounds for impeachment.
The activities of Left-fascist thugs, attempting to physically attack and silence Trump supporters and conservatives in general, are coming to bear a chilling resemblance to the political climate in the latter days of the Weimar Republic. This is emphatically not because the Sydney Morning Herald in October 2016 claimed that “Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler Have More in Common than Slogans”; rather, it is the institutionalisation and acceptance of violence and lies on the Left as an acceptable method of ideology making.
As Daryl McCann has pointed out (Quadrant, September 2018), Madeline Albright has called Trump, on no evidence whatsoever, “the first anti-democratic president in modern history”. This is not only false, but something like the reverse of truth. However, when it comes to the establishment attacking Trump, reason, logic and obvious facts cut no ice. A case could be made that he is hated, feared and despised by the media and other privileged denizens of academia, the “arts” and the political class, simply because he is democratic. He has better democratic credentials than all but a handful of presidents, and has ushered in an economic boom which has been of the greatest benefit to low-income-earners. This ignoring of fact and evidence for the sake of ideologically-based abuse seems to me to be itself a great threat to democracy and, in the long run, perhaps even to civilisation.
It appears to grow from overwhelming rage and fear on the part of the Left at seeing its overarching project for the socialist/communist transformation—or, for some, the destruction—of America and the West radically and effectively opposed for the first time since the Reagan Presidency. The fact that with the Obama Presidency it had looked as if the Left’s project was receiving a mighty boost towards total victory must have made Trump’s victory even more unbearable.
Writing in the Washington Post, the late Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by training, originally named the condition of Bush Derangement Syndrome—“the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush”. It has morphed into the more virulent and even more irrational Trump Derangement Syndrome.