Yes, Trump Derangement Syndrome Exists; but It’s Among His Supporters

That Pearl Harbor comment: Aside from being a fascist, the man is a national embarrassment. The deranged Americans are those who still support this charlatan.

I don’t understand why everyone is so upset about Donald Trump’s invocation of Pearl Harbor during his tête-à-tête with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. I mean, we learned that Trump actually knows who bombed Pearl Harbor. Shouldn’t we just take that W?

All right. Yes, it was a mortifying moment on so many different levels. A Japanese reporter asked him why he didn’t inform U.S. allies before starting the Iran war. Trump muttered a couple sentences about the element of surprise and then said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

First, of course, is how deeply offensive this was to an ally of 80 years—an ally that lived under American occupation, albeit in a comparatively benign form, for seven years. Takaichi said nothing, and indeed later in the day she flattered Trump in the appallingly fulsome way world leaders have learned they need to do, as with a small child. Reaction in Japan seems to be what we’ve come to expect: a combination of outrage and resignation that the president of the United States is both an idiot and a moral eunuch, from whom such simultaneously tedious and offensive bilge is expected.

For my money, one word in particular jumped out: “me.” Really? On December 7, 1941, Trump was four and a half years short of being born. But that small detail didn’t prevent him from conflating himself with the state. Someone else once did that. The Parlement of Paris contested certain royal edicts in 1655, and that’s when Louis XIV supposedly delivered his famous “L’état, c’est moi”; we knew that Trump believes he is the state, but he’s never expressed it quite so nakedly.

Then there’s the fact that the United States wasn’t an ally of Japan in 1941. Kind of an important difference. But most of all, in likening the U.S. attack on Iran to the Japanese attack on Hawaii, Trump was saying it was a good thing that the United States emulated the actions of a fascist regime that had killed millions and raped infants in China. Still, the details of history mean nothing to Trump. History is only about great men, and whether they win or lose.

Speaking of which: Trump’s reliably windy and adipose rhetoric notwithstanding, this war is not going amazingly well. The American and Israeli militaries are good at what they do. We know that. But what, exactly, are they doing? And are they actually seeking the same objective? Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does, and it likely involves occupying big chunks of southern Lebanon and toppling the Iranian regime, which will almost surely require the ground troops Trump has gingerly begun to mention.

The potential lack of coordination between these two armies and their governments opens the way for some huge problems ahead. Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field provoked a rare rebuke from Trump because Iran responded to the strike by hitting Qatari natural gas facilities. The attack wiped out 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas export capacity for the next five years. Experts say this is likely to impact many kinds of energy-related expenses, and for a lot longer than three months.

Look: For the sake of the people of Iran, I hope Trump’s gamble ends up paying off. But history tells us that all kinds of unexpected things happen in war. That’s why democratically accountable leaders generally don’t launch them without having really thought matters through (that the United States has defied this dictum twice in this century will linger as a dark stain on this country’s reputation for many decades to come).

Trump doesn’t think of himself as democratically accountable (and we can thank the Supreme Court for furnishing jurisprudential backing for that belief). The state, it is he. Any hope that he might learn something from history is of course delusional; to learn from history, he’d have to care about it. So he believed, or was convinced—and with the flattery that undoubtedly accompanied the advice he was getting in mid-February, it surely didn’t take much convincing—that he, the mighty Trump, the god-king, the Jesus-touched general in the Armageddon war against lunatic Peter Thiel’s Antichrist, could topple a government by sheer dint of his will.

That’s precisely the kind of thing you come to believe when you’ve cheated your way through life and never been caught; when you’ve fleeced hundreds of people and gotten away with it, with prosecutors deciding, as longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did, that you’re too powerful to indict; when you’ve lied habitually and seen that lying, far from imposing any price of social ostracism, actually works to your benefit virtually every time; when your social world consists solely of flatterers who marvel over your tacky taste and congratulate you when you insist your triple bogey was a par; when the founder of a leading network in a multibillion-dollar media apparatus essentially acknowledged under oath that said network’s stars lied on your behalf about a matter as consequential as a presidential election result; and when you and this armada of sycophants have duped millions of people who checked their common sense at the door that you have the unilateral power to lower gas and beef prices.

Am I overstating things? Do I suffer—gasp—from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Elsewhere today on this site, Simon Lazarus issues a sharp and necessary reminder to liberals not to get overly obsessed with Trump himself—to bear in mind the movement and the intellectuals that support him.

He’s right about that. At the same time, though, I’d say that we shouldn’t even accept the presumption that Trump Derangement Syndrome applies to people like us. It does not. The people who suffer from TDS in this country are the ones who support him. And it’s getting worse: This week, Nate Silver found Trump’s approval slipping into uncharted territory, and approval of the war generally polls in the 30s—but at the same time, an NBC News poll discovered that among self-identified MAGAs, Trump’s approval stood literally at 100 percent to zero.

They’re the ones with TDS. You and I have Trump Awareness Syndrome. We see his un-thought-out war—and by the way, if it’s almost over, why is he asking Congress for $200 billion?—and we hear him utter vacuous and offensive statements like the Pearl Harbor remark, and we know all too well what he’s doing to this country. Awareness is a far heavier burden than derangement.

War and Football? What Kind of Sick Mind Thinks That Video Is Cool?

The White House’s videos mixing football hits with bombing footage tell us: We have some twisted people running this country.

You’ve surely seen or read about the video the White House put out last week that interspersed bombing footage from Iran with punishing hits from NFL and college football games, over AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” You can see it here. You will also see that it was posted on X from the official White House account, which added one word to the visuals: “Touchdown.”

Football can be an ugly business, but it does not as yet involve the bombing of schools and the killing of innocent schoolgirls. Fortunately, several of the players highlighted in the White House post have decried the use of their images in this way. Former Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis told HuffPost: “I did not approve my image or football highlights being used to compare football to war. The game I love is about discipline, brotherhood, and respect. War is something entirely different. Lives are at stake. God bless our troops and their families.” His old teammate Ed Reed, after being alerted to the use of his image by journalist and Ravens fan Ben Jacobs, wrote on X: “I do not approve this message.” And former Nebraska Cornhusker Kenny Bell told The Washington Post: “For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick. I don’t want anything to do with images like that.” The cowardly NFL has yet to speak.

You may say it’s just a 30-second video and it’s about what we’d expect from these people. And you’d be right on both counts. But it seems to me this video is worth a little more exploration than that because it reveals a lot about what these apes are doing to our country. Actually, that’s insulting to apes, who live in quite sophisticated and empathetic societies. Let’s just call them vermin, although that’s probably insulting to rats too, but since it’s one of their favorite insults, let’s just turn it around on them.

Imagine being the juvenile White House staffer who came up with this idea. Imagine thinking that that was cool. How can that even happen? You have to have a love of gladiatorial violence. You have to believe that the lives of the people you’re killing have no value whatsoever. You have to revel in causing death. You have to see it all as a big joke. And you have to subscribe to a view of the world in which power, the ability to dominate and to rain down violence in extreme cases, is the only thing that really matters. And then you run it up the flagpole for approval, and everyone else thinks it’s cool too. How did we get here?

This has been the Trump ethos from the start. It would be funny, coming from such a weak and sad man: a draft dodger, a serial abuser of women (and maybe girls), a nonstop liar who’s spent 40 years hiding behind slick lawyers. But this weak and sad man, who probably couldn’t do five pushups if he had a gun held to his head, has convinced a third of the country that he’s a tough guy, and his propaganda outlets and the even weaker and sadder men in his party (the disgraceful Senator Lindsey Graham) have reinforced this hideous image.

Democracy is supposed to exist in conjunction with certain moral values. One core idea is that might does not make right. This is an old, old notion that goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The Sophist Thrasymachus argues that justice is nothing more than “the advantage of the stronger.” Plato has Socrates responding that this is wrong and defining justice in the ways most of us understand the word today—as believing and doing the right thing, irrespective of power relationships. Remember: This is the foundational text of Western philosophy. Thrasymachus was the bad guy. There’s a reason history has chosen to venerate Plato and Socrates, and not him.

You don’t need me to tell you which regimes in the history of the world have subscribed to Thrasymachus’s definition. It’s an ugly roster—to which we must now add the government of the United States of America.

The Trump regime has proven over and over that this is its morality. The DOGE cuts that have resulted in the deaths of poor children in Africa (as many as 700,000 a year). The repulsive cruelty that Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan and ex–Border Patrol head Gregory Bovino have imposed upon people living law-abiding lives. The lawless and amoral murders of the people on those boats in the Caribbean.

And now, the prosecution of this war. It’s not that so far, we’ve killed “that many” civilians—around 1,300, although the killing of those schoolgirls will be a historic blot on this country’s escutcheon for the ages. It’s the certain knowledge that this crew will do anything it decides it needs or wants to do because, for them, justice is exactly the advantage of the stronger; nothing more and nothing less. And that’s how people can decide that war has no more gravity to it than a football game, and that equating the two is funny. What a sick bunch of people.

It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État

During the campaign, it was kind of hard to picture the specifics of how Trump might pull such a thing off. Alas, it’s getting less hypothetical by the week.

Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy. We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric. But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make because it was hypothetical. Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals, or at least vague ones. And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague, so if she or any Democrat tried to say, for example, that there was a very real threat that once in office, Trump might try to cancel elections, most people kind of tuned that out.

I was more than willing to believe that Trump might try to cancel elections or take over the media. But even I, when I sat down to think about exactly how, couldn’t quite pin down the specifics. No president had ever tried to do either of those things, so how exactly could Trump pull them off?

Well, we’re now beginning to see. Let’s start with elections. The Washington Post—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists” (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.

The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie. China did not interfere in the 2020 election. Trump and his people often said so, the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.

None of it was true. Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China, but nothing that reached his father. The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

In fact, the report found—and isn’t this a surprise?—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia, trying to help Trump: “The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”

But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.

With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them. As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday: “Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs, he has even less here.” That is true. But remember: Between tariff “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed.

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting. But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures. On October 5, say, that might mean........

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