Sometimes what seems like a small annoyance can be a sign of a serious underlying malady. I am not speaking of a medical issue.
Most conservatives have long recognized that Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) infects many people, making them irrational and hyper-emotional — but it’s worse than that. It may be an intractable, devastating spiritual illness, long-term, and perhaps voluntarily incurable. If it is all that, and if more than forty percent of our population has it, then something unimaginably awful has happened.
Many of us may have shared the experience I shall relate, or something comparable to it. A friend, whom I shall not name, was a stalwart conservative with a presence on the internet, who masterfully pointed out all the reasons why Hillary Clinton, if elected president, would inflict terrible damage on the republic. Many of us read this person’s work and formed a modest following. Then Donald Trump descended the stairs.
It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Suddenly, Hillary was not so bad after all. It was candidate Trump who was not merely a misguided choice for the presidency, but an unmitigated monster with no redeeming qualities.
Not to worry, I thought. The competing campaigns would reveal Trump’s strengths and expose Hillary’s many and damning scandals. That happened. It was done. Okay, I thought — now our friend would come to the only sensible conclusion, a conservative conclusion. It could not be otherwise.
No. It got even worse. As time went by, it became clear that every minor blemish on Trump was declared Nazism, and every catastrophic feature of Hillary was either ignored entirely or was someone else’s fault. Whatever Trump said or did, it had to be vile and repugnant, if only because he was the one who said it.
I hope the following does not describe my friend, but you will have seen it for yourself in many others. What is not so easy to see is the spirit.
TDS has gone beyond a simple difference of opinion. One might understand how someone who was raised in a lifelong leftist environment, saturated by radical propaganda, ignorant of history and current events, might believe some of the continual and ferocious allegations against Trump. One might hold out hope that the light of truth would disinfect such a mindset. But when that does not happen, when someone’s view of Trump becomes one of unreasoning hatred and vitriol, that indicates that something much more extraordinary than political propaganda is at work.
Gradually, not wishing to believe it, I was forced to consider the terrible possibility that there is something supernatural involved. Oh, come now, one might say. Isn’t that a bit hyperbolic? Surely there must be psychological, medical, or sociological explanations for TDS.
Normally, yes, but this has gone way beyond normal. It is one thing for political discussions to include such sentiments as “Yes, I see why you believe that, but I disagree.” It is an entirely different matter when we are told that even a sensible position for, let us say, protecting women from violent crime is responded to with vicious accusations of racism, Nazism, and even sexism. Then comes the grand finale: “And there will be no further discussion with evil people like you.”
It is one thing for someone to say, “That can’t be true. Show me your evidence. ” It is quite another when the response is, “I don’t need any evidence. Everyone already knows that Trump is evil, and so are you.”
The sad conclusion is that, to those who are intractably infected with TDS, facts do not matter, nor does reasoning have any hope of moderating their hatred of the man. His most commonsense policies are rejected for no other cause than that they are Trump’s.
There is no ordinary explanation for this. Something evil is afoot.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.