Patrick Lawrence - ‘Trump derangement syndrome’

di Patrick Lawrence for l'AntiDiplomatico

At this early moment, it is impossible to say why an apparently ordinary 20–year-old attempted to assassinate Donald Trump while he, Trump, spoke at a political campaign rally in rural Pennsylvania last Saturday. Thomas Matthew Crooks could not have been more average in the way suburban Americans typically strive to be. He won a math and science prize when he graduated from high school two years ago. His teachers and neighbors describe him as “quiet” and “a nice boy.” In the photo circulated in the press since the events of last weekend, Crooks wears orthodontic braces.

What could possibly have motivated Crooks to fire multiple rounds from an AR–15, one of those assault rifles Americans are freely permitted to purchase for as little as $700, from a rooftop opposite Trump’s speaking platform in an attempt to kill the once and would-be president? This is our question. The extent to which Thomas Matthew Crooks was an utterly commonplace American, standard as if stamped from a machine, is precisely the extent to which this question must concern us.   

We will never hear from Thomas Matthew Crooks any account of his motivation: Secret Service agents shot in the head, killing him instantly, when they belatedly found him. This was plainly a case of political violence, but it is difficult to read Crooks’s politics. He was registered as a Republican, the conservative party in America, but not long ago he also donated—$15—to a “progressive” political project loosely identified with the Democrats. Crooks, it seems evident from what little we know, was like scores of millions of other Americans—politically confused, vulnerable to the manipulations of American media and the supercharged rhetoric that has overtaken America’s public discourse, driven to ideological passions out of some subliminal need to believe in something in a nation wherein there is very little left to believe in.

Cui bono? This line of reasoning emerged even before any details of Crooks’s attempted assassination became public. There was instant speculation that he acted for the Democratic Party, which has been in a state of frenzied panic in the weeks since Joe Biden displayed the extent of his senility before 50 million Americans during his televised debate with Trump on 27 June. The Democrats, after all, spent four years trying to discredit Trump with the concoctions we know as “Russiagate.” More recently, they have thoroughly corrupted the federal judiciary, from the Justice Department on down, in multiple attempts to eliminate Trump as a contender in this November’s presidential elections.

No, I do not think it is beyond the Democrats to resort to violence as Biden refuses to drop out of this race and, in any case, as the Democrats have no compelling candidate to replace Biden even if he does step side. While this judgment may appear extreme, it is well to remember the long history of violence embedded in American political culture. Suspicions mount now that Crooks may not have acted alone. Forensic scientists at the University of Colorado report that sound recordings made at the scene last Saturday suggest there may have been two shooters other than Crooks firing simultaneously at Trump.

Such matters remain to be proven, and we must wait for evidence that Thomas Matthew Crooks was part of an elaborate plot of the kind we now know killed Kennedy 61 years ago. But—a big “but” here—this is not to say the liberal authoritarians who control the Democratic machine do not bear responsibility for the fateful final act of Thomas Matthew Crooks. They do. Trump has been the object of recklessly inflammatory rhetoric for months, and I will shortly return to this point. But we must go back years further to understand what drove Crooks to take aim at Donald Trump. Then we will discover “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” the name those Americans who have not surrendered their sanity give to this phenomenon.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is an obsessive condition that causes those who suffer it to lose all reason and judgment in any matter having to do with Donald J. Trump. These afflicted people, all “liberals” in the American meaning of this term, cast Trump as the earthly incarnation of unalloyed evil. He was a Russian agent, he was a danger to the Atlantic alliance, he was a closet fascist. Nothing he said or did was ever to be credited. Nothing—no war, no domestic policy, no diplomatic initiative—was of any importance whatsoever next to the imperative that Trump must be removed from office and altogether destroyed as a public figure.

This is Trump Derangement Syndrome, briefly defined. It produced all manner of wild conspiracy theories among those who succumbed to it, the most famous of which was that Trump was a creature of the Kremlin. This leads us to the origin of this collective malady. It arose during the 2016 political season, when Trump and Hillary Clinton were campaigning for the presidency. And when Trump defeated Clinton at the polls that November, Trump Derangement Syndrome took on the character of the collective madness that has erupted periodically since Europeans settled America in the 17th century. Like the Quaker hangings in Boston in the late–1650s, the Salem witch trials a few decades later, the anti–Papal paranoia of the 19th century, or the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s, the syndrome had the character of all moral panics. It was in part a purification ritual wherein the defiled must be driven out.

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All Americans, including Donald Trump, were shocked as they awakened Wednesday, 9 November 2016 to discover that Hillary Clinton had lost the election held the previous day. But this was more than a defeat at the polls for American Democrats. Since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union fell, they had nursed a vision wherein neoliberal ideology was fated to reign without challenge or end across the planet. In 1992 Francis Fukuyama, a minor functionary in the State Department at the time, published The End of History and the Last Man, a preposterous book theorizing that with the triumph of Western liberalism humanity had no further to go.

Clinton’s defeat, then, was a crushing ideological blow to those who had embraced the vision Fukuyama had effectively codified. It was almost cosmic in its implications. Some vision, some ordained destiny, had not come to be. And so the source of an evil that had overtaken America and altered its transcendent trajectory must be found and blamed. Trump! Trump who let the Rrrrussians into the otherwise pure American political process! Trump must be expunged from the body politic.

This was Trump Derangement Syndrome as it was first manifest in among Americans of liberal persuasions. It is not to be mistaken as a purely political phenomenon: Trump’s political program, after all, is not at bottom greatly at variance with any other recent American president’s. Trump is as much an exceptionalist committed to the imperium as his predecessors—and, indeed, as the White House’s current occupant. No, the syndrome is fundamentally a question of collective psychology, a consciousness driven not by thought or calculation but by ideological belief. And Americans, as I have written elsewhere, almost always prefer believing to thinking.

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Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was in this way a great triumph for end-of-history liberals, as freighted with significance as Clinton’s defeat four years earlier. The evil abroad in American had at last been vanquished. The dream of eternal power would come true after all. This is why Democrats have been able to overlook so much of Biden’s record—his chronic dishonesty, his documented corruption, his serial hypocrisies. Party elites and the liberal media serving them have obscured all this. And his steady tilt into senility: This could be hidden, too.

But history did not end when Biden was elected. And Donald Trump has survived all manner of attempts to eliminate him as a political challenger in this year’s elections. Corrupting the judicial system, numerous court cases intended to destroy his candidacy—four, count them, all based on patently ridiculous legal grounds—have failed. Trump is now leading Biden in all of the countless opinion polls Americans conduct during their political seasons. And so Trump Derangement Syndrome returns to poison America’s political discourse once again.

The rhetoric is different this time—highly charged, juvenile in its incessant hyperbole, crudely propagandistic. Trump the authoritarian, Trump the tyrant, Trump the fascist—I am not making this up—will turn America into a dictatorship. He will serve with the status of a king. There will be no more justice and no more elections. The prisons will fill with Trump’s political enemies. Biden and the mainstream Democrats who sponsor him assert endlessly that this November’s election is the most important in American history, for Trump—Biden’s favored descriptive—is “nothing less than an existential threat to American democracy.”

We may consider the extent to which the return and amplification of Trump Derangement Syndrome is symptomatic of the collapse of American discourse and so the nation’s political processes altogether. And to this point, let us think about the mind of Thomas Matthew Crooks as he determined to take the AR–15 his father had purchased a decade ago and discharge its magazine as Donald Trump stood before a crowd of supporters in a small Pennsylvania town. We cannot and never will see inside it now, but we know very well Crooks was exposed to the prevailing political atmosphere. All Americans breathe the same air Crooks did. 

Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic machine now vigorously deny that their freakishly inflammatory rhetoric demonizing Donald Trump had anything to do with Thomas Matthew Crooks’s attempt to assassinate a political candidate. This is patently false, an altogether stupid argument: Inflaming the public is precisely the intent of all this profligately destructive language. Plainly and simply, Crooks presents liberal Americans with the wages of their indulgence in Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

My thoughts go to Hannah Arendt when I imagine, as best I can, Crooks’s state of mind as he lay prone on a rooftop last Saturday and took aim. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” Hannah Arendt wrote in a memorable passage in The Origins of Totalitarianism. “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Arendt looked back to the Nazi regime and Stalin’s Soviet Union when she wrote her celebrated 1951 treatise. But the thought seems never to have been thereafter far from her mind. Americans should consider it now. They are faced with the bitterest imaginable reality as they try to discover what caused Thomas Matthew Crooks, a spotlessly ordinary 20–year-old from an American suburb, to act as he did: It is perfectly possible he wished to purge the nation of an impurity, to serve in defense of American democracy.