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Trump Derangement Syndrome has riled and roiled our politics for a decade, and its only achievement has been sending Donald Trump back to the White House for a second term, and for now marginalizing the Democrats, whose approval ratings are stuck in the mid-twenties. Worse for the Dems, their loss in November was what Barack Obama called a “shellacking,” only more so.
They lost the popular vote and both houses of Congress, as well as significant numbers of the Democrats’ usually reliable constituencies. Voters also repudiated the Dems’ dangerous “woke” policies that failured to protect the border from invasion; fight crime and prosecute criminals; conduct a foreign policy that put America’s national security and interests first; stop culture-war enormities like biological males colonizing women’s sports and locker rooms; reform their tax-spend-borrow-redistribute economic policies; cease and desist from trans propaganda invading our primary schools, and to arrest, charge, try, and punished privileged protestors in Ivy League schools chanting their support for genocide, assaulting Jews, and other antisemitic offenses.
All those patently preposterous policies are inimical, if not fatal, to our Constitutional, Judeo-Christian, and Greco-Roman traditions, as well as abandoning both reason and common sense––and don’t forget the ridiculous lies they told about both Trump’s “fascism,” and Joe Biden’s cognitive decay.
Given this electoral disaster that followed Trump Derangement Syndrome, you’d think that the Dems and Petainist Rhinos would give up and instead focus on the issues angering and worrying voters, as Trump did. But OC TDS sufferers just can’t help themselves. Their social status, inflated amour propre, and lucrative political establishment are too precious. The Rhinos in particular can never forgive Trump for crashing their political guild party and perks.
A particularly incoherent example appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. Novelist Mark Helprin’s topic is an important one: the long history of bipartisan assaults on our Constitutional order and its foundational principles. And much of Helprin’s comments comprise bipartisan censures, except when he feels compelled to single out Trump and indulge hoary TDS clichés culled from ten years of anti-Trump invective, and festooned with a specious moral equivalence of the two parties.
It doesn’t take long for TDS, and its faithful companion blatant begged questions, to take over Helprin’s argument: “On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob incited by President Donald Trump smashed its way into the U.S. Capitol and threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence should he not halt certification of an election no credible evidence has ever suggested the president didn’t lose.”
Start with “incited.” It’s a strange coup whose instigator offered the D.C. mayor the help of National Guard to control it, and who advised his “mob” to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically.” Or that the demonstrations at the Capitol began well before Trump stopped speaking. Or that capitol police escorted many protestors into the building, and FBI false-flag assets were part of the mob. Or that the only fatalities from the violence were demonstrators, including an unarmed female Veteran whom a panicked or incompetent DC cop shot dead. Helprin’s lurid phrases “smashing their way in” and “threatened to hang Mike Pence” are loading the rhetorical dice. Does he really believe that given the armed police presence, anyone actually could have hanged the Vice President? As for the begged question “no credible evidence,” you can’t find what you don’t look for.
As for moral equivalence, consider this statement: “As if everyone has lost the track of governing justly, both parties traduce the Constitution—on one hand the metastasized and unchecked administrative state, and on the other DOGE’s cruel joy in throwing out the baby with the bath water . . .” These examples aren’t even close to being equivalent, morally or otherwise.
Clearly “the metastasizing and unchecked administrative state” refers overwhelmingly to the progressive Democrat presidents Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Though we should acknowledge that Republican presidents like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. and others contributed to regulatory expansion. But the Federal Leviathan has mainly been a progressive and leftist show. Their aim has been to create a bloated federal government that turns every problem into a “crisis” they can exploit to expand the technocratic regulatory Leviathan’s reach and power––at the expense of the Constitution and our unalienable rights.
Furthermore, the reference to the newly created Department of Government Efficiency is incoherent. In a short time, DOGE has identified waste, fraud, bloat, and abuse in Federal agencies that have squandered multiple billions of taxpayer money, not to mention the rank corruption and politicalization of those unaccountable alleged “experts” who are nearly all leftwing Democrats, particularly those “serving” in the DOJ and FBI who betrayed their Constitutional oath by trying to frame and remove a sitting president.
The larger issue, however, is once again the expansion of the bloated regulatory Leviathan into our private lives and our economy––to the tune of $3.079 trillion in 2022–– thus compromising our Constitutional freedoms and rights. How is it, then, that correcting the consequences of “the metastasizing and unchecked administrative state” that Helprin deplores a “cruel joke”? If it is, it’s one that millions of ordinary American taxpayers are heartily laughing at.
Next, his catalogue of other convergences between right and left is a useful reminder of how successful the progressive Democrats have been at achieving Obama’s aim to “fundamentally transform the United States,” which means weakening our Constitutional order of a limited checked and balanced government, and inalienable rights. But once again, Helprin ignores the much greater role progressive policies have played in worsening the problem.
Also, his claim that populist Republicans are indulging protectionism oversimplifies the issue. The U.S. has for decades been fleeced by disproportionate tariffs from friends and foes alike to the tune of $10 trillion, which has impacted our domestic economy and cost Americans jobs. And it’s an issue that President Trump campaigned on vigorously. So far, he’s had some successes, but it will take time to see if his trademark aggressive negotiations and policies will concentrate our economic rivals’ minds. But those squealing about “protectionism” should tell us the alternative solutions that haven’t even been tried, or obviously have failed for decades.
The pros and cons of protectionism is a legitimate discussion. Yet like most Never Trumpers, Helprin is compelled to rely on preposterous, stale talking points that contributed to the Dems’ disaster in November. Claiming that “the populist right has now joined. . . the left’s long tradition of appeasing Russia,” is a dubious exaggeration about the right. As if that weren’t enough to ensure his NeverTrump bona fides, Helprin in an aside adds a bizarre, mean-girl smear of Donald Trump: (“Other than hypnosis, what can explain why Mr. Trump, the golden hippopotamus of Mar-a-Lago, gives sway to Vladimir Putin’s every wish?”).
Helprin, like the Dems, may be trying to imitate Trump’s trademark rough humor — a political fool’s errand — or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, indulging a parody of Trump’s style. But given the long “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax engineered by the Dems and corrupted government agencies, and the still circulating campaign smear that Trump is a “Russian asset,” Helprin may think this is a clever way to play that dog-eared campaign talking point.
Helprin ends with some almost sage advice: “The sole force that can counter this is the restoration of fidelity to the principles of natural right as they were expressed with preternatural grace in the Declaration of Independence and then codified in the Constitution.” Amen to that, but which party for over century, later with help from some unipartisan establishment Republicans, has been relentlessly dismantling the Constitution and Bill of Rights? And which Republican president appointed the Supreme Court Justices who have put a stop to the attacks on the Bill of Rights? And Trump is still working to undo Obama’s fundamental transformations of the United States.
Finally, in just a little more than three months, Trump has put the lie to Helprin’s last words that “the current administration [is] failing splendidly [sarcasm?] almost every day.” That’s the sort of TDS hyperbolic nonsense that landed the Dems in the voters’ doghouse. Let’s hope they keep it up.