I’m not entirely sure who first coined the phrase "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but whoever it was hit the nail on the head. The term accurately describes the way the media — first during the primary season, and even moreso since — seems to lose touch with reality wherever Trump is concerned. Whether they’re breathlessly reporting that Trump didn’t evict lawful Iranian tenants from a building he bought in 1998, reading secret Nazi codes into his campaign announcements, pretending obvious jokes are sincere invitations to establish a new Soviet Union, declaring him both a terrorist and a toddler, or whatever other crazy thing, media flacks just become entirely unhinged when the subject turns to Trump.
It’s interesting that, while Trump Derangement Syndrome hasn’t really accomplished much by way of stopping Trump, it appears to be rather contagious. I’ve noticed an increasing number of regular people who appear to be coming down with this dread disease in recent weeks, as is brilliantly illustrated by this conversation (paraphrased, of course, but close to the original) between two of my dyed-in-the-wool Democrat-4-life friends:
He: Trump supporters are the stupidest people alive. I saw a group of them on TV the other day; put together, they may have just made it into double-digit IQ territory.
She: Oh, I know. His campaign has just brought out the absolute worst people. Ignorant, stupid, mean people.
He: One of them said he’d be paying close attention to the election results because he thinks the outcome might be rigged.
She: He’s just such a hateful person. So full of hate.
This is some classic Trump Derangement on display. Consider that after a back-and-forth about how stupid and (dare I say) deplorable all Trump supporters are, it still appears reasonable to chide Donald Trump for being hateful. If one’s mind is functioning properly, one should not be able to gloss so easily from heaping hatred and scorn on millions of one’s fellow Americans to complaining about somebody else being hateful.
This is a somewhat new occurrence in the United States. It’s traditional, of course, for politics to become rather heated; like all other spectator sports, it’s meant to pit the fans of red team against the fans of blue team in the hopes of generating a bunch more ticket sales. What I’ve not seen in previous years, though, is such widespread vitriol not toward the other team’s candidate, but toward its fans. I lived in Massachusetts, of all places, during the 2008 election, and even there, in the absolute Holy See of snotty, self-righteous progressivism, I heard virtually no venom or bile expectorated at the ordinary people who were planning to vote for John McCain. It was — even then and even there — still generally accepted that reasonable people could disagree about which identical agency puppet should be the next Mr. America. In 2012, I found myself surrounded by mainly Romney supporters, and again, there was no mention that anybody who supports Obama must be some sort of ignorant, inbred hick. Sure, Obama himself was a socialist and a communist and a Kenyan and a Muslim and all those lovely things, but nobody was getting spit on, beaten, pelted with eggs, and set on fire for backing the wrong horse.
In those halcyon days, of course, there was no orchestrated media campaign to destroy one of the candidates at any cost. In 2016 there very obviously is, and the fact that it’s been an overwhelming failure hasn’t prevented it from having unfortunate side-effects all the same. While it is pretty funny to consider that Trump’s total of negative one major newspaper endorsement might be a Radbourn-esque unbreakable record, it’s been an expensive joke.
From a libertarian perspective, of course, this is roughly the worst possible outcome. It would be great to see (and it was great to see) masses of Americans hating and despising both presidential candidates; showing people that the state is an evil imposed upon them and not the instrument of some mythical "general will" they’ve tacitly agreed to participate in is an important step on the road to getting rid of the ratty thing. Unfortunately, Americans have once again been distracted by the specter of "your team" vs. "my team," and have begun turning against one another and allying ever more forcefully with the state. I can’t imagine even one person being enthusiastic about a Hillary Clinton presidency if she hadn’t been able to set herself up as the anti-Trump who will save us all from, you know, just hatred in general. Somehow, the establishment media has managed to pervert the massive groundswell of anti-government sentiment that this season began with into a swell of anti-ordinary-people, pro-government violence. And that’s terrible.