The Right’s Trump Derangement Syndrome

Opinion|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.