My apologies in advance. I just could not resist this gem once I saw it and it sucked me in.
🤪
TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, is real. Many elite and rank and file MAGA people suffer from it. A wonderful NYT opinion points out the obvious (not paywalled):
The Right’s Trump Derangement Syndrome
Shortly before the last election, Scott Bessent, now Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary, assured The Financial Times that Trump had no interest in reducing international trade and that his threats to impose sweeping, 20 percent tariffs on foreign goods were simply a “maximalist” negotiating position to be watered down during trade talks. “My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” said Bessent.
A few weeks later, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Howard Lutnick, now Trump’s commerce secretary, whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could become secretary of health and human services. “Of course not,” said Lutnick, treating the question as if it were absurd.
During the transition, Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, acted indignant when Democrats asked Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, if she and the president-elect might consider blanket pardons for Jan. 6 insurrectionists. “I was the last member out of the Senate on Jan. 6,” said Tillis. “I walked past a lot of law enforcement officers who were injured. I find it hard to believe that the president of the United States, or you, would look at facts that were used to convict the violent people on Jan. 6 and say it was just an intemperate moment.”
Just last month, Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who is both a Trump apologist and a supporter of Ukraine, insisted that when Trump trashes Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, it’s actually a sign of affection. “Trump tends to talk that way to his friends,” said Crenshaw. “He tends to talk nicer to his enemies. So if he’s talking to you that way, it still means you’re his friend.”
Some of these men may have been deliberately dishonest, but I suspect there’s also a degree of self-deception at work here. In the four years Trump was out of office, an eerie amnesia about his erratic rule settled over the country, allowing people to project onto him hopes that were utterly untethered from reality. You might call this phenomenon, to appropriate a phrase, Trump Derangement Syndrome.The right invented the term Trump Derangement Syndrome to dismiss analysis of Trump’s autocratic tendencies, compulsive lying and generally detestable character as liberal hysteria. For conservatives who don’t want to engage with substantive criticism of their leader, it functions as a thought-terminating cliché, a term often used by people who study cults to describe ideological formulations that short-circuit critical thinking. Trump Derangement Syndrome implies that if someone tells you something about Trump that you don’t want to hear, that person must be crazy.
But the real derangement lies in either the refusal or the inability to see Trump clearly.
I’d argue that the doomsayers were also right about Trump’s first term, which was full of sadism, incompetence and corruption, and culminated in a coup attempt. But if it wasn’t as catastrophic as it could have been, it was because establishment figures often restrained him. The periods of relative stability provided by the adults in the room lulled people into complacency about how much damage an unfettered Trump could do.
Now the adults are gone, but Trump’s defenders are still pretending — perhaps to themselves as well as to the rest of us — that there’s order amid the chaos. After Trump berated and tried to humiliate Zelensky, the radio host Glenn Beck explained that he was really playing five-dimensional chess against Russia.
Speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook summit in December, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said Trump had grown over the past eight years. “What I’ve seen so far is he is calmer than he was the first time — more confident, more settled,” Bezos said. Sounds like Trump Derangement Syndrome to me.
Ya know, some opinion pieces are better than others. Right? But this one is better than most of the better ones. I love the turns of phrase here, (i) TDS functions as a thought-terminating cliché, (ii) an eerie amnesia about his erratic rule settled over the country, allowing people to project onto him hopes that were utterly untethered from reality, and (iii) he was really playing five-dimensional chess against Russia.
Bwahahahahaha!
I love it, utterly untethered from reality. A thought-terminating cliché. What a hoot! 5-D chess? By djt? Holy bejezus!! He can't even play tic-tac-toe and come to a draw! Wait, wait! He did ace the brainpower test.
The brainpower test
“Person, woman, man, camera, TV”
See, I'm bigly smart!
(the 3 animals: platypus, puppy, pig and rodent)
Q: Is Germaine, once again, off his brain meds for seeing this artistic opinion as exceptional in a good way?
PS: Geez, this post was a lot more fun than most.
