We All Have Trump Derangement Syndrome Because Donald Trump Is Deranged
You either love him like he’s a prophetic cult leader, or you hate him for being a moral, legal, democratic, and aesthetic stain on US society and history.
We’re all deranged, because Trump is deranged.
As on example of Trump’s derangement, just try to imagine him finally leaving politics and retiring from public life. I don’t believe he ever will — he needs constant money and presidential immunity to stay out of prison — but it would be funny and extremely sad in an existential sense to watch how obsessed and belligerent he will remain until his last breath.
Quick serious question: how many old people around do you see acting like Trump? What if ALL old people acted like him? Society would collapse. Our democracy is wobbling weak-kneed under the weight of just Trump, thankfully he’s an extreme outlier of derangement in human psychology.
Can you imagine Trump sitting back and quietly passing his final years like regular elderly, doting on his children and grandchildren? Trying to squeeze out a couple more hangouts with Eric? Walking along the beach with Melania? Do you ever really see Trump be thankful for the blessings in his life? He often forgets several of his children when listing them, and is rarely seen in public with Melania. He has more of business relationships with his family than father or husband relationships.
Do you ever see Trump be thankful for the magnificent opportunities in his life? He manages to be bitter about everything despite living decades as a billionaire (allegedly), self-proclaimed playboy, real-estate tycoon, reality TV star, and the President of the United States of America. Would a post-politics, retired Donald Trump be any more capable of offering retrospection or introspection than the Kelvin Scale zero he exhibits now?
I see him on his deathbed still demanding everyone around him believe he built the New York City skyline, he is worth $10 billion, his elections were rigged against him, “covfefe” was a secret message, the hurricane really was going toward Alabama, his inauguration crowd size was the biggest, he actually won all the popular votes, his hands aren’t small, and he accomplished more in one term than Lincoln and Washington put together.
Trump’s rotting almost-corpse will sour and smell worse than his current infamous six-day-left-in-the-sun-roast-beef-sandwich odor, and he’ll still be denouncing and hurling insults at his former enemies who would not go along with the brown-nosed aggrandizing on which his malignant narcissism unrelentingly depends.
I have empathy for the journalists and media personalities who will interview him in his imaginary, post-politics years, or even just talk to him in public. Can you picture Trump in an interview ever acknowledging a mistake? Expressing regrets? Acknowledging times when his personal hubris backfired? Grappling contextually with the historically negative reactions he has inspired in so many of his fellow citizens? Apologizing for any of the casually lamentable things he has said about random actresses, gold star families, wounded veterans, faithful public servants, entire groups of people in America who collectively make up a majority of the nation, or literally anyone with which he has momentarily been upset with the petty impulsiveness of an emotionally dysregulated toddler?
The truly awful personality Trump is exhaustively burdened with is impervious to my very day-dreamy satirical mind’s imaginations of him being capable of any of these basic displays of self-actualization and maturity. The impressions turn sociopathic when you remember his truly napoleonic achievements in character defects. He’ll be in and out of courtrooms all this year for prosecutions and lawsuits ranging from defamed rape, to rampant fraud, to deadly insurrection, and to national security treason. And there is a cornucopia of relatively smaller crimes like witness tampering, obstruction of justice, perjury, emoluments clause violations, tax evasion, and so many more that it’s obvious he’s blatantly guilty of, but it would just be too much effort and cost for the US court system to hold him accountable for all of his nonstop criming.
Trump is a spectacular and now textbook example of village idiot greed and civic selfishness. How many elderly his age have you known or even heard about who have spent their lifetimes personally and documentedly screwing over so many people from business partners and contractors, to customers and investors, to his own family members? It was tens of thousands of people his belligerent self-absorption negatively impacted even before he got into politics. In his years in politics he has attacked the vast majority of Americans in some insult, threat, or scapegoating. He has certainly attacked everyone who wants to live in a democracy and have a serious country not hijacked by the nation’s preeminent sexist and racist in a fascist movement coup fueled by whiny little bitch egomania and a yearning for childhood love taunting him into pyrrhically ruining the vibe of democracy and freedom by trying overcompensatingly to dominate everyone around him. He is not normal. He is deranged.
And there are no bigger victims than Trump’s own fans and supporters because he grifts them every chance he gets. He has sold them cheap crap with his name on it made in China for decades crammed full of lazy brand licensing. He started a scam university and didn’t teach a class. He set up a charitable foundation to use as a personal slush fund. He’s selling multiple rounds of worthless, self-reverential NFT crypto pump-and-dump schemes. He started slapping his ogre name on as many gaudy buildings as he could in the 70s, and all these years later his vulgar con man racket is still going.
Donald Trump is the worst American living right now, and a lot of the people you might suspect could give him a run for his money in a competition of the worst Americans are friends with Donald Trump. The world’s most dictatorial sociopaths keep getting caught colluding with his political campaigns, and he falls so deeply in love with them he tells us it often enough that it’s very weird and should probably be investigated by the CIA. He also gets emphatically endorsed by America’s most loathed icons of toxic masculinity, and keeps accidentally having dinner with literal Nazis. This is not normal. It is deranged.
Contrast Donald Trump with Jimmy Carter, an ex-president who doesn’t regularly attack and scapegoat most of America. Can you imagine Trump devoting his life to charity for his remaining years like Carter has? What a laugh! A more realistic post-politics Trump would spend his geezer years golfing with his circus of hangers-on, wannabe-alpha brown-nosers at his money-laundering front Mar-a-Lago and the various Saudi kickback LIV golf tournaments hosted by his golf courses listening to their passionate odes about his emperor clothes. But Trump will remain still always bitter because he knows more than anyone these opportunistic freeloaders are really just interested in getting in on the grift and profiting off the proximity that allows them to swindle his pavlovianized MAGA cult too.
Trump is a political adaptation of the film Sunset Boulevard personified. His body will break down as he continues shouting out into the approaching void that he is human history’s greatest winner yet greatest victim, and feebly tossing burger plates against the wall smearing ketchup when he gets upset. He will get only angrier, and, as his cultural relevance fades, he will ever more petulantly demand the world pay attention to him with ever more deplorable acts of repugnant indecency well beneath the dignity of the Office of the Presidency and the American public bureaucracy.
America is fortunate Donald Trump’s demagogic political hold on racists, misogynists, and other idiot xenophobes was not grasped in an earlier decade of his life, and we must thankfully be surely getting close to the end of his strength to convincingly whisper sweet nothing affirmations into the ears and subliminal fantasies of the most politically deplorable people in this country whose minds simmer always with culture war division and toxic hate as they punch down and look for marginalized groups of people on which they can blame all their problems, personal failings, and fears of living in a country that necessarily adapts to an ever changing world.
Even luckier is the Republican Party. As Trump more fully accomplishes his octopus-tentacled stranglehold on the GOP with unprofessional nepotism — such as appointing his failed cover song singer daughter-in-law Lara Trump as RNC co-chair to better ensure he can steal all the national party’s money to pay his omnipresent legal fees and fines — Lindsey Graham’s prophetic warning that Trump would destroy the GOP comes more into focus. Trump will suck the party dry like a parasitic leech or like the kind of vampiric tyrant that the ancient Greek democracy we are modeled after would have ostracized and expelled from Athens.
Perhaps it’s true I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. We all do. But I’ve been writing about how Trump is the worst American for some time now, and he keeps doing and saying even worse things. If I’m deranged for often calling it out, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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