Do I have Trump Derangement Syndrome?

The US president is going to give us a thousand years of woke

I try to avoid expressing strong opinions on foreign party politics, because I enjoy the luxury of not having to. From an outside perspective, American politics seems dominated by two quite extreme fringes, the only difference being that the mad things believed by Democrats tend to be aped by British elites, and therefore have an impact on our everyday lives here.

The Republican Party’s insane ideas are in contrast a punchline to Europe’s governing classes, and indeed tend to cement support for the opposing views. Trump’s rhetorical excesses and breaking of political norms – loser’s consent being the most outrageous example – may suggest poor character, but they have little effect on our politics other than as a source of horrified amusement.

Now, with both the stock markets plunging and the American president’s aggressive rhetoric towards fellow NATO members, I fear that I finally have full-on Trump Derangement Syndrome and, having been uninfected during the first wave, have no immunity. I genuinely now worry, years after everyone else, that he is a catastrophe, not just for American politics but for the western alliance generally, and for the political Right everywhere. Not only are we all going to be a lot poorer and the world a lot less safe, but we’re also going to end up with a thousand years of woke after Trump is finished; he will truly be the Julian the Apostate of our time.

What has caused this late-onset TDS, however, is not Trump’s behaviour, but the relative silence of his critics. During Trump’s first term, everyone in the American establishment seemed to be calling him the next Hitler, and this included not just the usual academics and journalists but many major corporations; companies like Nike, Heineken and Airbnb were at the forefront of the ‘resistance’ against the president, a trend labelled ‘CEO Activism’. It was quite obviously self-interested and performative, because if everyone in your country is calling its leader a fascist dictator, then you probably don’t live in a fascist dictatorship.

I have no idea where I saw this meme, but it makes me laugh

That is not the case this time around, and that is more troubling. I recall from my time volunteering for first aid training that, when you arrive at the scene of an accident, you don’t go to the person screaming in pain, but the individual lying on the ground in stony silence. Similarly, the fact that people working for large corporations now keep quiet about Trump, even as he embarks on the most reckless economic policy in recent years, should probably concern us. The reason they keep quiet - and this is something I have heard from the horse’s mouth - is because they feel that there is a real risk of punitive action if they speak out.

The constant evocation of fascism is not just mistaken in my view, but neurotic. Western civilisation is emotionally scarred by the violent racial supremacism of the Nazi regime and in particular the Holocaust, the worst crime in history, yet people have a tendency to fight the last war and this isn’t the danger that Trump represents. He is not a white supremacist and not especially motivated by ethnic nationalism. He is, however, authoritarian in nature, prone to be vengeful to those who cross him while also surrounding himself with yes-men, and he does seem to have territorial ambitions, even if they concern a frozen wasteland. Those things are all bad enough in themselves.

Rather than being a new Hitler, a more realistic concern is that Trump represents the 19^th century spectre of Caesarism, a man who uses democracy in order to establish himself as an imperial figure. The fear of a Caesar always haunted the founders of the Republic, obsessed with Roman history as they were and sceptical of democracy and mobs.

Caesars do not come out of nowhere, and the progressivism of the last few years has been deeply illiberal, hostile to freedom of speech and even more so to freedom of association. Jonathan Haidt talked of ‘decentralized totalitarianism’ and it was the chaotic nature of woke progressivism that made it so disconcerting and caused many people, including those same corporate leaders, to stay silent.

Many of the things Trump is now doing are not entirely dissimilar to what radical progressives did when the opportunity arose, in particular the determination that institutions are cleared of their opponents. It is bitterly ironic, for instance, to have the Left accuse Trump of ‘rewriting history’ for ideological reasons (gosh, imagine!). Yet there is something quite different about people scared of online mobs and being scared of the government. Activists, though loud and hysterical, could be ignored if people only had the courage to face them (which they usually didn’t); the state can make your life very difficult indeed. Already the Trump regime has punished law firms which oppose their leader; foreign nationals who’ve expressed criticism of the regime have been detained. These are not good signs.

I’ve sneered at the American critics who worked themselves up into hysterical rages about Trump, not just because of their puritanical piety but because of the lack of awareness about their own behaviour, in particular the conspiracies about Russia and the dishonest, partisan nature of American journalism (Trump is probably the most dishonest president in US history, but it may also be true that he is the most lied about). In the modern liberal imagination, in part because so many people read far more fiction than history, Trumpian figures tend to be opposed by a courageous ‘resistance’, whereas in reality most dictatorial leaders arise because there are no moderate alternatives, and the opposition is similarly extreme and unpalatable. There were no real goodies in the Spanish Civil War, nor in Syria, nor even in much of central-eastern Europe in the mid-20th century, where fascists fought communists for control of the streets.

I’m not the only late-onset TDS victim. Richard Hanania recently suggested that people suffering from the syndrome were right all along - it’s not all some psychotic delusion, your husband really is trying to drive you mad! In Hanania’s view, Trump has cultivated a cult-like following, enabling scammers and grifters, while engaging in far more corruption than the establishment he derides.

Trump appeals to westernism, the belief in the supremacy of western civilisation, but his philosophy is essentially third world in nature. He has personally enriched himself by politics in a way characteristic of banana republics, making millions through a meme coin, while hundreds of thousands lost money in the scam. Rather than being an ideologically motivated new Hitler, he’s more like a corrupt Latin American showman-dictator.

Like such figures everywhere, Trump has driven away the talented and surrounded himself with yes-men, grifters and conspiracy theorists, sacking ‘at least three senior National Security Council officials at the urging of the far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer’. Loomer has reportedly ‘claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines’ in order to suppress turnout at an election. Exactly the type of person you want to have influence over the world’s most powerful man.

Genuinely authoritarian regimes tend to see a large exodus of intellectuals, and we will have to wait and see whether this actually happens here. Jason Stanley, who has made a career out of labelling everything he dislikes ‘fascist’, has recently left for Canada after years of warning about Trump, but I’m not sure that quite counts as a brain drain yet. There have been some reports about Americans moving to Britain, although I am sceptical that many will accept the huge pay cut involved, and it has amused me to read of Americans moving to Europe to ‘escape far-right politics’ - the next few years are going to be a journey! (In an ideal world, Britain would be trying to attract educated Americans to come to an expanded Cambridge, perhaps with an image of a sour-faced Puritan beckoning them to come home to escape ‘ye ungodly tyrant’.)

All sorts of predictions were made about Trump’s second term but, from an outsider’s perspective, it has been notably far worse than his first and all the hysterics have been proved correct. Perhaps it is an interesting example of basic instincts being more accurate than complex theories: the obvious explanation, that he is a malignant narcissistic crook who is intellectually out of his depth, now seems like a better explanation than the complex, nuanced theories that it’s all part of some grand 4D chess strategy for defeating Our Enemies.

What also concerns me about is that many regimes of the past have tended to get more unpleasant as their economic policies have failed, because they have nothing left to appeal to except tribalism. If Trump’s tariffs end up further immiserating the working class, is he going to accept that he’s to blame, rather than attributing it to his ideological enemies - and becoming increasingly vicious as a result? You don’t have to have full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome to think that it’s only going to get worse.