The Spread of Trump Derangement Syndrome
There’s been a disease affecting progressives, conservatives and libertarians the past 18 months. It causes them to think and behave irrationally and to break out into fits of hysteria and rage. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome which has lead people of all political persuasions to abandon levelled, reasonable and fact based analysis of Trump and his policies. When he was running for President there were constant screams that he was the next Hitler and Fascism was on the rise again. These claims were basically made because he said mean things and that was all the proof needed to prove he was the worst person ever to run for President. They seem to believe that saying mean things is worse than mass murder, corruption and lying to voters.
In the aftermath of his victory the sufferers of Trump derangement syndrome are now making it their task to find any story (no matter how unreliable) that Trump might be backing down on a key policy or appointing a bad candidate to a government position as proof that he is the worst. It also includes completely ignoring a lot of the good policies that Trump has announced during the campaign and only highlighting bad policies (a lot of which are not even policies and are mainly just remarks he said off the cuff) as proof a Trump presidency will be a disaster. When Obama included Hillary in his cabinet, he was hailed for putting together a “team of rivals”, but Trump is being accused of putting together an alleged “team of racists”, despite the fact that he’s considering people from all across the board, including some social liberals.
It is clear that the people affected by this disease are incapable of conceding that some Trump’s policies might benefit both America and the rest of the world. They cannot be reasoned with, their minds are made up and no amount of factual evidence of what Trump will actually do will change their minds. They are on a rampage constantly raging about the impending doom to come of a Trump Presidency. It affects people of all different political persuasions but for different reasons which will be stated below.
It’s pretty easy to see why progressives are especially triggered and irrational when it comes to Trump. Because Trump has no time for political correctness and identity politics, which the left hold dear, they conclude he must be racist, sexist, homophobic and “bigoted” in general. Trump never said anything racist, his policy of stopping illegal immigration from America’s southern border and immigration from countries that have a history of supporting terrorism was designed to protect American citizens of ALL races. He supports legal forms of immigration and is of course married to an immigrant.
He is not sexist, he just wasn’t ashamed of discussing how much he liked beautiful women or being a raging heterosexual. Rape and sexual assault against women will not become legal and sexual harassment will not be condoned in national policy. He is not homophobic or transphobic as he isn’t bothered by same sex marriage and doesn’t care if transgender people use the bathroom matching their gender identity. He also promised to protect LGBT people from hateful foreign ideologies in his nomination acceptance speech. But none of these facts matter, you hear hysterical claims from progressives that minorities are going to be put in camps and women all over America will have their pussies grabbed.
Libertarians are not much better, they call Trump a fascist because he is a supporter of the police force and has no sympathy with groups that cause civil unrest such as Black Lives Matter. This is despite the fact that Trump has given no indication he will get in the way of states legalizing marijuana, which has been a long time goal of libertarians, as criminalised marijuana is a major contributor to the expansion of the police state and sees non-violent offenders going to prison.
Because Trump has said he wants to bomb ISIS they say he is just as awful as a neoconservative. This is despite the fact he wants to restore friendly relations with Russia, which had become dangerously strained, and wants to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian Civil War. He ran on a modest non-interventionist platform calling the Iraq War and the Libyan intervention disasters. Doesn’t sound like a person who will bring about World War Three which I would think all libertarians would be against?
Mainstream conservative opposition to Trump appears to stem from the fact that he was a Democrat for most of his life and doesn’t seem to have a deep grounding in conservative political philosophy. The response to that should be so what? Trump has been a businessman most of his life, not a political intellectual. Plus people are allowed to change their political views throughout life, Ronald Reagan the great conservative President started life as a Democrat. Because Trump was for single payer healthcare, abortion on demand and gun control in the past should be irrelevant when considering the merits of his policies now. They forget that Mitt Romney the previous Republican nominee actually introduced while he was Governor a state version of Obamacare yet there was no raging against him.
Both conservatives and libertarians say he is not in favour of the free market due to his policies against free trade. However that is only one aspect of free market policy. His tax policy would see some of the most significant tax reductions in recent times, he wants to cut in half federal regulations and stop all government interference in the energy market. This is quite a change from the previous 8 years of the Obama Administration.
It is unlikely that this response to the sufferers of Trump derangement syndrome will have much of an impact on them. So what is the cure? The only real cure is the passage of time and the results of the implantation of Trump’s actual policies. It will become apparent in the end to all reasoned people that all this hysteria about a world of doom with Trump as President was laughable. These political commentators and intellectuals who spread this fear of Trump will soon have their careers consigned to irrelevance. Judge Trump on his actions, not on some things he said off the cuff, not on some unreliable news reports but on his results.