Our Trump Deranged World

Our political discourse reflects our political culture, which in turn reflects our broader culture—which is just another way of saying it reflects the home in which we live. If there’s a pervasive problem in our political discourse, our house is not in order.

Bad political rhetoric is nothing new. It’s arguably part of the human condition. Aristotle, Cicero, the Framers, and George Orwell all warned about the dangers of sloppy, misleading, or demagogueish rhetoric. In the very last paragraph of The Federalist Papers, Hamilton cautioned against “the military despotism of a victorious demagogue.” If Hamilton could imagine this in the 18th century, then what we face today is far from unprecedented, at least as a concern. Still, even if the problem is perennial, the form and expression it takes changes with our institutions, technologies, and cultural habits. 

The phrase that prompted me thinking about all of this is a regrettably all-too-familiar one: Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It’s everywhere.  If you’re on any social media, it’s hard to go a day without coming across it. I’ve even heard it floated as if it were a real diagnosis, formally recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. (Cue the Arrested Development narrator: “It is not.”)

So here’s my confession: this phrase triggers me.  Hugely. At times, I’m nearly as emotionally triggered by the phrase—especially when it’s lobbed at me or my friends or political allies—as I am by some of the deplorable actions taken by Trump himself. So much so that I am tempted to wonder if there’s a “Trump Derangement Syndrome Syndrome,” a condition for people triggered by the phrase.

Why does this phrase bother me so much? One possibility is the simplest:  I suffer from TDS, and I have it bad. Maybe I do turn every molehill into a mountain. After all, the phrase does capture something real about the difficulty of staying level-headed in the Trump era—a difficulty I personally find exacting and exhausting. But before I stick with this self-diagnosis, let me make a case for why at first blush it’s simply a bad phrase.

Its purpose isn’t clarity but dismissal. It’s shorthand for:

• You’re irrational.
• You’ve lost your senses.
• I don’t need to refute your arguments, because they’re obviously flawed.
• In fact, I don’t even need to listen to you

It’s performative, not substantive. Like “Let’s Go, Brandon!” it says a lot without actually expressing what is intended to be conveyed. And what it ultimately says is: You and your words don’t count.

Here the work of philosopher Harry Frankfurt can shed light on this rhetorical turn. In his 2005 book On Bullshit, Frankfurt draws a helpfulful distinction between lying and bullshitting. A liar knows the truth and tries to conceal it. To paraphrase one of his own examples, if I say I have $100 in my wallet in my right pocket, when I know I don’t even have my empty wallet with me, I am lying. Bullshitting, Frankfurt argues, is different. For the bullshitter, facts (and the truth more generally)  are irrelevant. The bullshitter’s concern is not accuracy but the effect of his bullshit on the audience. Liars intentionally deceive about the truth. Bullshitters don’t care whether what they say is true or false. Their only concern is their effect.

Trump, who I and others have called a con-artist, is a bullshitter without parallel in the modern era. When he claims to have had “the biggest electoral mandate in 129 years” or the best polling numbers of all time, he’s not lying in the traditional sense. He hasn’t checked the data; he doesn’t know or care. His aim is simply to score points and inflate his worth. The truth or falsity of the claim is irrelevant. If the facts help him, fine. If not, also fine.

Of course, Trump Derangement Syndrome is just one of many emotionally charged, rhetorically loaded bullshit expressions that saturate our political discourse. Left and right alike wield them. These shorthand terms (or tropes) don’t illuminate reality or advance discourse or deepen understanding; they signal team loyalty, score points, and shut down conversation. They’re rhetorical weapons, not tools of understanding.

Here are a few familiar examples:

• “The swamp.” Allegedly this term indicates the corruption in D.C. But Trump himself has flaunted corruption in the open, so it’s obvious that one person’s swamp is another person’s agenda at work.

• “The deep state.” Bureaucratic inertia is real, as is bureaucratic resistance to the will of elected officials, but this phrase is a vague catch-all for distrust of institutions, giving them a shadowy, X-Files conspiratorial quality.
• “Woke.” Originally this vaguely meant awareness of injustice. Now it’s a slur against diversity and inclusion—values that many people endorse but are here treated as sinister simply by labeling them as woke.
• “Fake news.” This is an oldie but goodie, effectively meaning simply “news that Trump doesn’t like.”
• “Snowflake.” This is my personally least favorite. Why? Because every morally sane person has feelings, and most everyone’s feelings can be fragile and hurt by others.  Worse yet, from my perspective, it seems that the people who most often hurl this invective are comically un-self-aware of their own supreme delicacy. (Exhibit A: the outrage over Cracker Barrel’s rebranding.)
• “Globalists.” To whom does this refer? Often it points to people who favor free trade and the open exchange of ideas, but its connotation hints at elitists who favor one-world government.  It’s intentionally open-ended.

There are, of course, other equally charged phrases, but what unites all these phrases (and others like them, whether invoked by the RIght or Left) is that they end rather than advance conversation. They don’t encourage nuance; they don’t try to shed light on complexity; they’re not attempts at bringing a topic closer to reality. They’re rhetorical bombs designed to derail rather than to reveal. They are effective bullshit. They score points without helping us better understand reality. 

Which brings me back to Trump Derangement Syndrome. On one level, it’s classic Frankfurtian bullshit: dismissive shorthand meant to belittle. But on another level, it may unintentionally capture something real about our world. I think this is the reason, finally, I’m so triggered by its use as a slur.  

Trump exerts an extraordinary gravitational pull on our political culture. Imagine a planet many times larger than Jupiter suddenly entering our solar system. Its gravitational force would be wildly disruptive. That, in effect, is President Trump. He is the newly inserted mega-planet of our political solar system, with a far greater reach on our thoughts and actions than Putin, Musk, Xi Jinping, or (dare I say) Taylor Swift.  Through relentless ambition, a towering ego, shameless self-promotion, and the destruction of virtually every traditional norm of discourse, he has hoisted himself into becoming the central figure around whom everything orbits. This is not accidental.  He wants his name and face on buildings, universities, and museums. He wants his taste in music memorialized and honored. He wants the world and our thoughts remade in his image. 

And beyond all predictions, he has largely succeeded. Both supporters and opponents are caught in the gravitational pull of his orbit. His supporters adore him, excuse anything, and cheer him on at his rallies like the groupies that they are. His opponents struggle to maintain hope in a normal future. 

There is a disturbance in the Force, and that disturbance is Trump’s gargantuan ego and personality.

Supporters and opponents alike–we all think about Trump. Every day. Whether we love him or hate him, he lives rent-free in all of our heads. In that sense, the entire country—and arguably the world—suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a sign of an individual’s pathology, it’s a sign of a very real change in the world. 

The consequences of this oversized gravitational pull will be measured for decades. But one of its most immediate and obvious effects is the explosion of rhetorical bullshit in our discourse. My every instinct suggests the distribution of bullshit tilts heavily to the right, but I can’t pretend it isn’t prevalent everywhere. When politics feels existential, truth takes a backseat to team loyalty. A measured fidelity to facts wherever they may fall seems like a luxury—or worse, a betrayal.

Neither our own political system nor, frankly, any decent political system ought to orbit around one man. The Framers deliberately built checks and balances to prevent concentration of power. Even Abraham Lincoln, in the depths of the Civil War—the moment we came closest to dictatorship, no matter how justified—said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

Lincoln recognized he was not the center of the universe–both in fact and in aspiration. Trump, by contrast, demands to be. And when a political culture bends around one man, the result is not just bad policy or bad governance. In fact, it’s bullshit.