Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times published a column last week that grappled with the hat grappled with the fact that the GOP has become a political cult beholden to whatever impulse Trump has at that particular moment and no matter what he does, they have to treat it with all the hosannas the Orange Rotten Pumpkin demands.

This is, in fact, the real 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.

 

But the real derangement lies in either the refusal or the inability to see Trump clearly. A few months ago, if people had predicted that Trump would cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine, destroy U.S.A.I.D., free all the Jan. 6 convicts, put his lackey Kash Patel in charge of the F.B.I. and turn us into a despised enemy of Canada, they’d have been accused of unhinged political hatred. As Nick Catoggio wrote in The Dispatch, Trump’s second term is “shaping up to be what doomsayers thought his first term would be.”

 

I’d argue that the doomsayers were also right about Trump’s first term, which was full of sadism, incompetence and corruption and culminated in a coup attempt. But if it wasn’t as catastrophic as it could have been, it was because establishment figures often restrained him. The periods of relative stability provided by the adults in the room lulled people into complacency about how much damage an unfettered Trump could do.

I would argue that this isn’t just limited to Trump supporters and minions but also leaks over in the centrist world. Even on occasion, you see Democrats doing the “gotta hand it to Trump” thing. What they really need to know also is any sort of appeasement to what the right is doing at the moment won’t be enough. Like, this is a spectacularly foolish thing to put out:

🧵It was never going to be easy or painless to overturn decades of free-trade policies that have failed working people, but we have to think in years, not days.

— Congressman Jared Golden (@golden.house.gov) 2025-03-04T18:03:40.461Z

“You should accept suffering because there’s a chance the crazy guy is right at some point years from now” is not defensible. He already looks bad and will only look worse. This is not a winning message, not when we may be facing interrupted SS payments in a few months. Although it is only a very small percentage of Dems doing this stuff.

And I really think this is deeply relevant and I know it’s enough to make some people start rolling on the floor and speaking in tongues, but unless you have been paying attention to the online world over the last 5-10 years you do not really understand exactly what it is they are up to, and I think some (not all, not Chris Murphy for example) Dem politicians do not really see it because of this:

This is it. You cannot explain in polite conversation that the higher echelons of US policy making are on personal terms with something called Bronze Age Pervert without yourself sounding like a maniac

— zatapatique (@zatapatique.bsky.social) 2025-02-15T11:53:58.705Z

The plans are all out there for anyone to see. And they are batty.

One is the idea that AI will completely reshape the economy to the point where everything will be nearly free. Getting there, even if it would work, would cause immeasurable pain, but that’s no big deal. The Unelected Foreign-Born U.S. President believes that empathy is actually a problem. Both Cassandra and I have written about the architect of many of their bizarro ideas, Curtis Yarvin. He calls himself Mencius Moldbug. That someone who refers to himself as Mencius Moldbug is currently a major voice shaping policy would be surprising to anyone who is not aware that a major influencer in rightwing political communication and someone who has Trump’s ear goes by Catturd on TwitterX.

And oh by the way, Elon might be digging around our government data because he fell behind in the AI race.

All of this is madness. Unfortunately, it is also real. Our elected officials and everyone who is not in the bag for the Trump cult need to treat it with the urgency the situation demands.

The last word goes to India.Arie.