Category: trump derangement syndrone

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I have had it with Trump

We have all had election nights where it seemed as if one side was going to win and then it did not. I thought there had been election irregularities with mail-in votes. Was it the reality distortion field of Trumpism? Probably. So I have been down in that gravity well looking out from a distorted perspective. I thought Biden might well have won, but it was not clear. Fair enough. My bad. Biden won.

That is not what I am talking about today. From what I read, thanks to Douglas Murray, Trump incited an attack of a mob on the legislature buildings of the Congress. His words inflamed an already tense situation.

There are at last two ways of looking at his speech: a crime, or worse than a crime, a mistake. The moralists will call it a crime, and maybe they are right.  The cynics will call it a mistake. As Talleyrand said of some political murder committed by Napoleon, “worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” What was this man trying to do? Overturn constitutional authority? No conservative or constitutionalist can abide the chief magistrate inciting a mob to attack a duly constituted part of government, be it his legislature or his judiciary. This behaviour is to be condemned.

As a conservative I deplore Trump’s incitement.  But as a reader of Machiavelli, I observe that this is a disaster for conservatism of any meaningful sort. Now I never considered Trump to be a conservative or a free trade liberal. He was an economic nationalist and he did some good in relation to improving the conditions of the American working class through trade treaties heavily advantageous to the United States. He insulted, amused and bravado’ed his way to the top of the Republican ticket, and beat the worst establishment candidate (and to be the worst of this crowd takes some doing). He kept on pissing off people who I enjoyed seeing pissed off (an unworthy, ignoble but real-enough emotion). His very buffoonery and obnoxiousness was obviously an attraction for many people aggravated by endless political correctness and moral posturing.

I have always held Trump in a balance of judgment. The scales, until recently (in my view) weighed more in favour of The Donald than against him. He was more sinned against than sinning: the Russia gambit was totally hot air and shown to be so. Then it was Ukraine’s turn to be the de-legitimizing agent. In the meantime we were supposed to ignore a summer of riots by Antifa and BLM which were demonstrably egged on by Democratic politicians. The left was crying wolf for too long to be heeded.

There has been too much crossing of all previous lines of decency and self-restraint in recent years, by both sides. No one spent time figuring out why Trump won in 2016. And I hope the Republicans will spend some time figuring out why they have lost the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. All this is for the years to come. You must figure out why you lost before you can win again. I fear that both major parties in the States will learn nothing from their respective defeats in 2016 and 2020.

But for now, Trump has destroyed his brand, disgraced his party, embarrassed those of his supporters who are able to be reasoned with, confirmed every judgment against him, justified Trump Derangment Syndrome, and empowered people who will be quick to suppress public discussion and robust political debate. I am not happy with the state of the Union, and with myself for having indulged this buffoon. I reserve the right to change my mind later, but for now, I feel contrite.

 

 

 

 

 

Trump is making things worse – Andrew Sullivan with Sam Harris

This is a full and complete explication of Trump Derangement Syndrome by two highly articulate men who are suffering from it.

According to Harris and Sullivan, Trump is guilty of the following:

 

  • He is worsening the leftism of BLM and the extreme Left, by everything he does and is
  • He worsens the faults of all his opponents
  • He is greedy and malevolent and unaware of this deficits
  • He has denounced white supremacy in insufficiently strong terms
  • He is charcterized by extraordinary and extreme pathological narcissism,
  • Which prevented him from making objective and useful judgments about COVID
  • It is almost supernatural how he manages to skate through situations that would have torpedoed the Presidencies of anyone else
  • It is as if he were an extra-terrestrial put down among us to upset all our ideas and values
  • He is the object of a cult
  • His self confidence and psychological tenacity force those around him to accept his reality
  • It is a warlord mentality, and the capacity to pull this off is a disability on his part
  • He has the virtue of energy, and only mental illness can explain it
  • He has never spent a moment in silence or self-reflection
  • There is no governing process in his mind
  • He would need more virtues to be a more dangerous man
  • He has not sought to persuade; that would have given the persuaded some deference to their independence of mind
  • He wants to be a talk show host sitting in the Oval Office
  • He considers the entire political constitutional system to be a reality entertainment show.
  • Our judgments are objective.

The two of them are frankly in awe of a person whom they hate, or cannot figure out. “I think he has gotten into my head”, said Sullivan. Sullivan likens him to a totalitarian despot whose poster is on the walls everywhere.

Sam Harris:

“There are people who just don’t see this about him… I don’t have a theory of mind for those who don’t feel this way.”

Go to minute 43:00 of the podcast for Sullivan’s understanding why people who don’t like what the Left are doing to the United States would vote for Trump. It is as close as they get to understanding the other side, which is not close at all.

Sullivan and Harris also decry the New York Times, the Steele dossier, CNN, and the obsession with Russia-Trump collusion. It is as if their Trump derangement syndrome is rational, but the lower orders of the media are not entitled to their biases. They are alike with Scott Adams in their denunciation  of the “fine people” hoax that Trump had not sufficiently denounced white supremacy after the Charlottesville riots. They denounce the racialization being practised by the left wing media. They denounce the suppression of news regarding Hunter Biden by major news outlets.

These are two rational people who are caught on the narrow ledge afforded by reasonable views about the Left, and what I consider irrational fear of Trump. I think a lot of people are on that ledge.

And “of course” says Sulivan we should not be examining too closely the revelations from Hunter Biden’s computer about influence peddling with China and Ukraine. They go back and forth between understanding the causes why Trump was voted into power, and not understanding what he is doing to answer the constituencies that elected him.

 

 

 

 

 

Pure projection

Andrew Sullivan’s latest rant against Trump summons the psychological portrait of Shakespeare’s Richard III to malign him. You can learn a great deal about Richard III by reading it, and nothing about Trump.  I recommend you read Sullivan precisely because it is so overwrought, so demented, it is a form of entertainment – granted of a dubious variety. An election will not be sufficient to end Trump’s rule, he says.

 

“This is what we’ve been dealing with in the figure of Donald Trump now for five years, and it is absurd to believe that a duly conducted election is going to end it. I know, I know. I’m hysterical and over-the-top and a victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Trump is simply too incompetent and too lazy to be an actual tyrant, I’m constantly scolded. He’s just baiting me again. And so on. But what I think this otherwise salient critique misses is that tyranny is not, in its essence, about the authoritarian and administrative skills required to run a country effectively for a long time. Tyrants, after all, are often terrible at this. It is rather about a mindset, as the ancient philosophers understood, with obvious political consequences. It’s a pathology. It requires no expertise in anything other than itself.”

Observe that Sullivan is saying that tyranny need have no objective correlatives or characteristics. It is “pathology” – a sickness. In consequence no evidence is needed, because tyranny is not an arrangement of power.

“This is Trump’s threat. Not the construction of a viable one-party state, but the destruction of practices, norms, civility, laws, customs and procedures that constitute liberal democracy’s non-zero-sum genius. He doesn’t need to be competent to destroy our system of government. He merely needs to be himself: an out-of-control, trust-free, malignant narcissist, with inexhaustible resources of psychic compulsion, in a pluralist system designed for the opposite.”

Sullivan asks us to consider Trump’s greatest policy failures: “the appalling loss of life in the Covid epidemic and the collapse of law and order in the cities.”

As you consider these events, you see a plague unleashed by China (whether by negligence or intention we do not yet know) and principally handled by state medical authorities,  and a Democratic Party actively fomenting or encouraging nightly riots while defunding and otherwise demoralizing the police from handling them.

In the case of COVID, Trump has done everything that medical authorities have recommended. He may have intimated his skepticism about some of the advice he has received, but he has taken it and acted upon it. How is Trump responsible for the deaths of people from COVID, any more than he is responsible for deaths from flu or cancer? To ask the question is to answer it. He clamped down on travel from China earlier than the press thought he ought to have done and was crucified for it. All the clampowns, masks and social distancing have done little to nothing to prevent its spread but have harmed the economy and suppressed social and religious activities.

As to the antifa and BLM insurrections in Democratic-controlled cities, Sullivan would have us believe that Trump is responsible for them. If Trump’s responsibility for the deaths from COVID is minimal, his responsibility for the acts of his enemies is nil. Sullivan would say that Trump, by his character and speech, has created the American political Left. His claim is absurd.

“All he wants is chaos, because in chaos, the strong leader wins. Would he incite violence on his behalf if the votes seem to be drifting away from him? You bet he would.”

I cannot link Trump, the bogeyman of the Left, with the stand-up comic, troller, and provocateur that I see. As was pointed out by a ranter a few weeks ago, Americans are going to vote for Trump more because the Democrats and their actions and beliefs piss them off than because they are enamored of the President. This may be a negative impulse, but Democrats need to own up to the extent to which their own behaviours are bringing up the Trump vote.

Which brings too mind this rant, which I found in sieving Facebook last week. It is harsh, very American in tone, and far more true than I would like.

“We consider you to be more despicable, more dangerous, more stupid, and more narcissistic than Donald Trump.”

Reposted from FaceBook.
“If you are a liberal who can’t stand Trump, and cannot possibly fathom why anyone would ever vote for him, let me fill you in.
It’s not that we love Donald Trump so much. It’s that we can’t stand you.
And we will do whatever it takes — even if that means electing a rude, obnoxious, unpredictable, narcissist (your words not ours) to the office of President of the United States — because the thing we find more dangerous to this nation than Donald Trump is YOU.
How is that possible you might ask?
Well, you have done everything in your power to destroy our country.
From tearing down the police to tearing down our history to tearing down our borders.
From systematically destroying our schools and brainwashing our kids into believing socialism is the answer to anything (despite being an unmitigated failure everywhere), while demonizing religion and faith, and glorifying abortion, violence, and thug culture.
From calling us racists every time we expect every one of any skin color to follow our laws equally to gaslighting us about 52 genders, polyamory, grown men in dresses sharing public locker rooms with little girls, and normalize the sexualization of young children, you simultaneously ridicule us for having the audacity to wish someone a “Merry Christmas” or hang a flag on the 4th of July, stand for the national anthem, or (horror of horrors) don a MAGA hat in public.
So much for your “tolerance.” (See why we think you are just hypocrites??)
We’re also not interested in the fact that you think you can unilaterally decide that 250 years of the right-to-bear-arms against a tyrannical or ineffective government should be abolished because you can’t get the violence in the cities you manage under control. That free-speech should be tossed out the window, and that those who disagree with your opinions are fair game for public harassment or doxing. That spoiled children with nose-rings and tats who still live off their parent’s dime should be allowed to destroy cities and people’s livelihoods without repercussions. That chaos, and lawlessness, and disrespect for authority should be the norm.
This is your agenda. And you wonder why we find you more dangerous than Donald Trump?
Your narrative is a constant drone of oppressor/oppressed race-baiting intended to divide the country in as many ways as you possibly can. You love to sell “victim-hood” to people of color every chance you get because it’s such an easy sell, compared to actually teaching people to stand on their own two feet and take personal responsibility for their own lives and their own communities and their own futures. But you won’t do that, you will never do that because then you will lose control over people of color. They might actually start thinking for themselves, God forbid!
This is why we will vote for Donald Trump.
Not because he is the most charming character on the block. Not because he is the most polite politician to have ever graced the oval office. Not because he is the most palatable choice, or because we love his moral character or because the man never lies, but because we are sick to death of you and all of the destructive crap you are doing to this once beautiful and relatively safe country.
Your ineffective and completely dysfunctional liberal “leadership”(?) has literally destroyed our most beautiful cities, our public education system, and done its damnedest to rip faith out of people’s lives.
However bad Donald Trump may be, and he is far from perfect, every day we look at you and feel that no matter what Donald Trump says or does there is no possible way he could be any worse for our country than you people are.
We are sick to death of your stupid, destructive, ignorant, and intolerant behavior and beliefs — parading as “wokeness.” We are beyond sick of your hypocrisy and B.S.
We are fed up with your disrespectful divisiveness and constant unrelenting harping and whining and complaining (while you live in the most privileged nation in the world) while making literally zero contributions of anything positive to our society. Your entire focus is on ripping things down, never ever building anything up. Think about that as there is something fundamentally very wrong in the psychology of people who choose destruction as their primary modus operandi.
When Donald J Trump is reelected, don’t blame us, look in the mirror, and blame yourselves.
Because you are the ones that are responsible for the rise of Donald Trump. You are the ones who have created this “monster” that you so despise, by your very actions. By your refusal to respect your fellow Americans and the things that are important to us.
You have made fun of the “fly-over states,” the people who “cling to their guns and religion,” the middle-class factory workers and coal miners and underprivileged rural populations that you dismissively call “yahoos” and “deplorables.” You have mocked our faith and our religion. You have mocked our values and our patriotism. You have trampled our flag and insulted our veterans and treated our first responders with contempt and hatred.
You have made environmentalism your religion while trashing every city you have taken responsibility for. You scream from the rooftops about “global warming” and a “green new deal” while allowing tens of thousands of homeless people to cover your streets in literal sh!t and garbage and needles and plastic waste without doing a single thing to help them or solve the environmental crisis your failed social policies are creating. But we’re supposed to put YOU in charge of the environment while gutting our entire economy to institute this plan when you can’t even clean up a single city??
You complain — endlessly — yet have failed to solve a single social problem anywhere. In fact, all you have done is create more of them.
We’ve had enough. We are tired of quietly sitting by and being the “silent” majority. So don’t be surprised when the day comes when we finally respond. And trust me it’s coming, sooner than you might think. And also trust me when I say it won’t be pretty. Get ready.
When Donald Trump is reelected it will be because you and your “comrades” have chosen to trash the police, harass law-abiding citizens, and go on rampages destroying public property that we have all paid for and you have zero respect for.
When Donald Trump is reelected it will be because we are sick of your complete and utter nonsense and destruction. How does it feel to know that half of this country finds you FAR more despicable than Donald J. Trump, the man you consider to be the anti-Christ?
Let that sink in.
We consider you to be more despicable, more dangerous, more stupid, and more narcissistic than Donald Trump. Maybe allow yourself a few seconds of self-reflection to let that sink in. This election isn’t about Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden.
This is about Donald Trump vs YOU.
So if on the morning of November 4 (or more likely January 19, by the time the Supreme Court will weigh in on the mail-in ballot fiasco that we are headed towards), and Donald J. Trump is reelected?
The only people you have to blame is the left-wing media drones and yourselves.
You did this.”

______________________________________

End of Facebook rant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the tsunami of unreason crashes against the shores of reason

I feel like an onlooker to a battle in the US Civil War. I can hear the rattle of musketry and the blast of cannon fire. In places our side, the Union, is falling back and needs reinforcements. In others the Confederate onslaughts are being driven back with losses. The outcome is still uncertain, but the generalship is superb. While my eyes tell me that the outcome is still in doubt, my ears are telling me that the attacks are being rebuffed. Our side is firing back accurately. Troops are moving to the right places. Commanders are keeping their cool and feeding in reserves at the right places and times.

General Biden is decomposing before our eyes, as Scott Adams says. General Trump is maintaining his cool. He was boring in his acceptance speech, largely because he was not allowed to be impromptu, and had to read off the teleprompter. His speech was long because he had so much to boast about. And the fascists of Antifa keep reminding us that the fate that awaits us is a perpetual boot to the face for being white.

In my view anti-whitism is the largely unspoken but real issue in the election. I mean that everyone is aware of the claims being made against white people, but no one is explicitly responding in public discourse to the challenge. As Barrelstrength is not in the line of fire we can respond more overtly to this gigantic lie. In brief, the manifest failure of American blacks to equal the performance of other ethnic or racial groups is being attributed to the evil power of systemic racism. Systemic racism is a weird voodoo that, unbeknownst to its practitioners, which are exclusively white people, is an evil emanation of white institutions, thoughts, and culture. Blacks are so feeble that they have fallen under the domination of these evil mojo emanations of Everything in the World made by White People, and since white people made everything in the United States (according to this view), systemic racism cannot be cured until everything white is destroyed.

This view has many white allies, which consist of BLM activists and antifa, and thier dupes in the intelligentsia.

Observe [below] the white woman in the pink sweater being menaced by an angry mob for failing to raise a fist for BLM. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your future, if Biden and the Democrats win. This picture is what the election is about. It is not anything smaller or different. It is not, therefore, about COVID, the economy, China, Russia, or foreign interference in US elections. It is about the future state of white people. Will there be a boot stomping on your face forever for being white, or not?

Seen in that light, the outcome of the election is obvious.

 

 

Our Orwell, who art in Heaven

The events of the past months – murders, riots, firings for writing that all lives matter, statue shattering – reveal that the Leftist war on the past is total. The Left seeks power for ever, by erasing the past. The coverage of Trump’s speech before the Mount Rushmore monument showed that patriotism is now considered by the New York Times, the Washington Post and their ilk to be white supremacy. White supremacy is touted when there has never been less chance of encountering even so much as white self-respect. White idiots are kneeling before black people seeking forgiveness. Useful idiots every one.

Faced with my incapacity to say anything sufficient to the occasion, I refer to George Orwell for relevant insights and quotations, This one is from “the Prevention of Literature”

 

“Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has
often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian.
Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes
were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and
the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism
and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that
prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy
and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its
doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be
accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always
liable to be altered on a moment’s notice. Consider, for example, the
various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an
English Communist or “fellow-traveler” has had to adopt toward the war
between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was
expected to be in a continuous stew about “the horrors of Nazism” and to
twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September,
1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned
against than sinning, and the word “Nazi”, at least as far as print went,
had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8
o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start
believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had
ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a
writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance
at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his
subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he
has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but
the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political
writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases
bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the
unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous
language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one
cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an “age of
faith”, when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is
not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be
possible, for large areas of one’s mind to remain unaffected by what one
officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature
almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever
enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no
imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical
writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most
serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered during a
thousand years.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an
age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure
becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost
its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a
society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become
either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the
truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary
creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not
have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain
ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another
impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy
–or even two orthodoxies, as often happens–good writing stops. This
was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English
intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an
experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two
things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies:
as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth
reading.”

Trumpophobia 4

Matt Taibbi nails it in the most recent Rolling Stone. He captures the complete detachment of those who claim to be for the American working class and the American working class itself, by relating the carnival atmosphere at a Trump rally in Cincinnati, Ohio. His report, though thoroughly hostile to Trump himself, breaks through the pretensions of our Social Betters to expose the relevant fact: Trump is enormously popular with broad sections of the American people, people who are despised by the media and ignored by its political class. Revenge of the Deplorables, Part II will be in a theater near you.

Trump in Cincinnati August 2019

Taibbi writes: “Back on Pete Rose Way, a meager crowd of 100 or so protesters remains gathered across the street. A few anguished-looking college-educated types hold a banner reading “Hate Has No Home Here.” Walking up and down their side is a young activist with a bullhorn.

“I hate to break the bad news to you,” he shouts across the asphalt divide. “Trump doesn’t give a shit about working people!”

“Fuck you!” one of a trio of young MAGA dudes shouts in reply.

“His buddies are laughing and high-fiving. They’re having a blast. The anguish of the lefty protesters is the best part.

“Throughout Trump’s speech, spectators came down to taunt the libs. It got tense enough that a row of helmeted cops showed up, stringing patrol bicycles end to end in the middle of the street to create an ad-hoc barricade.

“He’s a fucking con man,” the would-be Ortega on the other side is chanting now. “Don the con . . . All power to the working class!”

“We are the working class, buddy!” an older man shouts. More laughs.”

“We are the working class” – that is the truth, and everyone in the transaction knew it.

Taibbi states the obvious, which in a time of deceit and nonsense becomes a revolutionary act.

“The average American likes meat, sports, money, porn, cars, cartoons, and shopping. Less popular: socialism, privilege-checking, and the world ending in 10 years. Ironically, perhaps because of Trump, Democratic Party rhetoric in 2020 is relentlessly negative about the American experience. Every speech is a horror story about synagogue massacres or people dying without insulin or atrocities at the border. Republicans who used to complain about liberals “apologizing for America” were being silly, but 2020 Democrats sound like escapees from the Killing Fields.”

Exactly. Trump is going to crush the Democrats. This uncouth monster will have another four years, and not a single besser-wisser upper class toff and Volvo-driver will be able to do anything about it. Nor will any of the woke swarms of the multi-culti, or privileged and over-promoted black progressive bourgeoisie, be able to stop it.

It will be a pleasure to watch their heads explode, though after all these years it is dispiriting to see them incapable of responding intelligently to the political challenge of Trump. The reason they do not respond intelligently to Trump is that to do so would signify that they knew there were wrong about something. As they are infallible, or so they believe, they will lead the charge the same old way at the same old enemy and be destroyed in the same old way he has done before.

Is it not time for some of Trump’s enemies to admit publicly that, as a politician, he is very smart? Is it not time to learn from defeat?

Trumpophobia

I am surrounded by Liberals and Democrats. “Not my President” stickers can be found in the summer colony I inhabit in July and August. Conversations have to be carefully managed to avoid any serious discussion of the Donald. Known Trumpists gather in small groups and exchange significant winks. A sentence is sufficient. This is probably as it should be, or as good as it ever can get. It is Volvo territory, and the chattering classes are firmly convinced that the United States has been taken over by an uncouth narcissist who opposes all the good things in life.

I agree that Trump is uncouth and an egotist, and I don’t care. You ask why? Because every time the President gets into a spat with some sacred cow of the Left, the range of what can be said by others expands. The most recent example was his taking on of the Congressman from Baltimore, an American black politician. Trump called his district in Baltimore a rat-infested dump, and after all the outrage of the left (racist! racist!) , it became possible to talk about the poverty and lack of civic virtue of the black population of Baltimore, and by extension, of all the other violence- and rat-infested cities governed for too long by Democrats, sustained by black majorities. Racist indeed. We are allowed on occasion to point out realities, as long as we can bear the opprobrium of the Left. But it takes an ice-breaker like Trump to call spades, spades.

The best of anti-Trump invective comes from Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine. It should be read, despite everything that is wrong with it, because it is the best expression of the concerns that a certain class of American has about Trump. Never mind that it is overwrought, partizan, snobbish and ultimately even silly. Sullivan compares the American Republic to Rome, and gives a useful precis of how Rome transformed from a Republic into a dictatorship over the course of a century or two of political turmoil, civil war, faction war, and occasional massacres.

Sullivan’s main points regarding Trump are as follows:

” If republicanism at its core is a suspicion of one-man rule, and that suspicion is the central animating principle of the American experiment in self-government, Trump has effectively suspended it for the past three years and normalized strongman politics in America.”

” He has also definitively shown that a president can accept support from a foreign power to get elected, attempt to shut down any inquiry into his crimes, obstruct justice, suborn perjury from an aide, get caught … and get away with all of it. “

“But when the president himself declares the system he works in is rigged, when he opines that electoral fraud is rampant, when he accuses his own FBI and intelligence services of being corrupt, he accelerates this process of delegitimization.”

” The second case against complacency is that a key branch of government that can and should restrain presidential overreach, the judiciary, is being methodically co-opted for the cause of executive power.”

“And the third is precedent. If republican virtues and liberal democratic values are a forest of traditions and norms, Trump has created a vast and expanding clearing. What Rome’s experience definitively shows is that once this space is cleared, even if it is not immediately filled, some day it will be.”

” A republican president respects how the system works, treats power as if it is always temporarily held, interacts with other agents with civility, however strained, and feels responsible, for a while, for keeping the system alive. Trump simply has no understanding of any of this. His very psyche — his staggering vanity, narcissism, and selfishness — is far more compatible with monarchical government than a republican one.”

The whole of Sullivan’s article, except for his precis of Roman history, proceeds from of a lack of insight into several important features of US politics, which have been present since Hamilton and Jefferson went at each other with equal acerbity and suspicion in the 1700s.

Paranoia: the republic is always in danger from the plots, misdeeds, and of concentration of power in the Presidency, which in principle should be restricted to executing the laws that the Congress has passed (as people of this school maintain when the President belongs to a party they oppose).

Lack of historical perspective: power has been concentrating in the Presidency since Teddy Roosevelt, and not just in the regime of his distant cousin Franklin. You could look at the criticisms of Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus (the freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure) in the Civil War as an example of Presidential concentration of power and suspension of civil liberties

Assault upon norms: Trump has consistently refused to take shit from a media class that has been determined to destroy him and whose animus against him and impotence is revealed daily. People elected him to fight back against the smothering liberal consensus and he has, successfully. He does not need press conferences when he can reach millions through tweets.

The case for Trump is most succinctly made by Conrad Black: that after 32 years of the family regimes of Bushes and Clintons, where a Bush or a Clinton was either a president, vice-president or secretary of state, something ended the soft-left passivity and decline. That event was the Trump election.

Nothing in the past three or four years has surprised me more than the hysterical and fact-resistant reaction of liberals to Trump. It is as if the totalitarian instincts of the American liberal – by which I mean leftist – have been given free range. Everything they accuse Trump and his followers of being: racist, ignorant, anti-immigrant, white supremacist, seems to have been the cover for a snobbery so gigantic it defies description, or in my case, understanding.

The useful portions of the American public, the people who drive ambulances, police the streets, fight the fires, build and repair cars, the genuinely civic minded, occasionally church-going, and non-fanatical American working class, and the rest of the civic core of American society, has been held up tp the opprobrium of people whose living is earned treating in symbols and information.

The people who have received university educations seem, by and large, to be anti-Trump, and I doubt not they cloak themselves in concern for the norms and practices of republican government. It seems to me however that the Gramscian long march through the institutions is bearing fruit, and that a class of people falsely and wrongly educated in American “educational” institutions is being told their views are wrong and that they are superfluous. As indeed they are. Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

Anyone who doubts that Trump will crush his opposition in the next election is not paying attention. This certainty – as near as life and fortune allows – is becoming obvious even to some Democrats. I am taking bets.

It has been a good week

Jody Wilson-Raybould eviscerated Justin Trudeau in detail, and revealed him for all to see as a floundering, feckless, effete fop. His moral preening about being a feminist and pro-native has been eclipsed by the light shone on his and his government’s behaviour.

Trump bats it out of the park in his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference. A relatively neutral observer, Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine, wrote:

“It’s way too early to be thinking this, much less saying it, but what the hell: If Donald Trump is able to deliver the sort of performance he gave today at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual meeting of right-wingers held near Washington, D.C., his reelection is a foregone conclusion.

“There is simply no potential candidate in the Democratic Party who wouldn’t be absolutely blown off the stage by him. I say this as someone who is neither a Trump fanboy nor a Never Trumper. But he was not simply good, he was Prince-at-the-Super-Bowl great, deftly flinging juvenile taunts at everyone who has ever crossed him, tossing red meat to the Republican faithful, and going sotto voce serious to talk about justice being done for working-class Americans screwed over by global corporations.

Jussy Smollett’s hoax was fully exposed as a complete fabrication.

All the Usual Suspects supported Smollett the same way they piled on to the poor kids at Covington High School. Hate hoaxes are numerous because they fit into the prejudice that white people are seething with hate against lefties, darkies, and queers, whereas the hate is almost entirely directed by left-wingers at normal people.

The Michael Cohen expose of Trump’s misdeeds before Congress went badly: he refused to confirm any of the Demented Party’s favourite calumnies against the Donald. Two years’ worth of nonsense was denied by Cohen, but you had to watch carefully because Cohen was repentant for being toxicly male. Tucker Carlson shows how much Cohen in substance effectively denied the Russian collusion myth.

The Green New Deal, the plan for destroying the American economy, will continue to undermine the Demented Party’s chances in 2020.

I may be entirely wrong, but I am feeling that this past week marks the beginning of the end for Trudeau Junior, and has provided further evidence that all the enemies of Trump will be confounded. The enemies of Trump are blinded by their hatred. I did not think that blind hatred was a real thing but I see too many well-educated intelligent people who have lost their minds over Trump. Their reason has gone. Their aim is off the mark; they cannot see him, they only see their hatred.

To quote The Donald: “If we don’t go off script, we won’t save the country”.