The term they came up with was Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. We were all hyper-ventilating. Or they’d mock us as bots yelling “Orange Man Bad” in mindless unison. They minimized all the madness as “mean tweets.” They affected an ironic distance, telling us we were being trolled, or taking Trump “literally” rather than “seriously” — whatever the hell that meant. I remember the scoffs and eye-rolls as a handful of us predicted, from the very start, that Trump would never concede power if he lost re-election, and were told we had lost our marbles. He was never a real threat to democracy, they assured us. The word “tyrant” was absurd hyperbole. Calm down.
And it would be convenient if all these self-serving blandishments were true and we could now move on, and forget about it all. But they were never true. They were always cope. Trump was and remains the greatest threat to American democracy in the White House in its history. And we are now seeing more clearly what would have happened if Trump had won a second term, as the arc of his deranged psyche has evolved as it always does with a tyrant, into greater and greater extremes, deeper and deeper insanity.
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Since 2020, Trump has embraced Q-Anon, intoning speeches to its creepy background music and amplifying its insane theories on Truth Social. Last week he invited a Pizzagate conspiracist and her cronies to Mar-A-Lago, telling the assembled throng: “You are incredible people, you are doing unbelievable work and we just appreciate you being here and we hope you’re going to be back.”
Two days before Thanksgiving, Trump hosted Kanye West for dinner at Mar-A-Lago, well after West’s descent into pathological Jew-hatred, alongside one of the most repellent far-right creatures ever to crawl from under a rock, Nick Fuentes. That same week, Trump trashed the Supreme Court Justices he and the Senate appointed:
We now know that Trump tried to target his enemies with tax investigations; claimed to have sent the FBI to “stop the election [of DeSantis] from being stolen”; considered bombing Mexico; declared that he will almost certainly pardon the goons of January 6; and demonized the appointment of a new special counsel. He declared that Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, “has a DEATH WISH. Must immediately seek help and advise from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!” He has routinely deployed anti-Semitic and anti-Asian tropes — even weirdly against Glenn Youngkin.
And, en passant, the former president has also called for the termination of the Constitution:
This statement didn’t make the front-pages of the WaPo or NYT the following day.
In Trump’s speech announcing his candidacy for 2024, he pledged to send the military into the cities to enforce law and order — “and if they don’t want our help, we’re going to insist that they take our help”; he promised a new system of justice in which accused drug kingpins would be tried, convicted and executed the same day; and he backed the death penalty for all drug-dealing charges, however minor. These are, to put it bluntly, fascist measures which would require the termination of the Constitution to enforce.
And, with a handful of exceptions, the Republican leadership has been incapable of taking on this fascism. If Trump had been re-elected, they would be even more quiescent. Their reaction to his call to terminate the Constitution was laughable in its cowardice. (The invaluable Will Saletan has a summary of their pathetic gestures here.) The only thing that has in any way damaged Trump has been the sanity and wisdom of some moderate Republican voters, most crucially in Georgia, who used the elections of 2020 and 2022 to vote against Trumpists, while still supporting other saner candidates.
Did the system survive? Yes, it did. Would it have survived Trump’s re-election? I truly don’t think it would have — and the arc of Trump’s tyrant syndrome suggests some kind of constitutional and civil breakdown if he’d held on, as he intended.
None of this is new to you or me. I am writing it because we simply cannot become inured to this, even now, even when the threat seems at bay, as Trump licks his electoral wounds, and as some in the party begin to sober up. There are times when a judgment of character matters in politics. And those of us who judged Trump as mentally unstable, dangerous, delusional, fascistic and tyrannical were dead right.
It’s in the interests of Republicans to bury this record of iniquity — to move on as if it were all some kind of surreal dream. It’s in the interests of Democrats and some Never Trumpers to argue that Trump is merely a symptom of a degenerate GOP and added nothing uniquely dangerous, which is why DeSantis is no different.
It’s in the interest of the republic that we do neither; that we face up to the indelible stain this one hideous man, and one man alone, placed on America’s democratic order, however degenerate his party was to elevate him; that we recognize the unique nature of the threat; and remain vigilant against it. The threat is not over. And it gets darker by the day.
