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I have a thesis for you: "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is overwhelmingly an intellectual escape hatch for Trump supporters. There are people who genuinely gone off their gourd re: Trump, but he provides an incredible amount of "attack surface" to critics, to the point where it is basically impossible to mount an intellectually respectable defense of him or his presidency that still appeals to widely held ideas about how government ought to operate. TDS sidesteps that neatly. Instead of trying to rebut criticisms, you simply dismiss them as irrational and hysterical (and thus not worth considering) and never think about them again.
As a sufferer myself, I think the serial tds claimers are pretty much on point. We Trump-deranged really are responding to Trump on a gut level -- every indicator flashes, 'do not trust', 'total bullshitter', 'malevolent', 'cannot be reasoned with'.
The only difference between us and tds detractors is that they think this reaction is pathological and not based on anything substantial, whereas we think it's soundly justified by a wide range of facts and life experiences. They want to know 'is there anything he could do to please you?', and the answer is no, not without becoming someone else. They want us to look past his style to what he does, and we want to say, 'no, I refuse, the style itself is corrosive and cannot be looked past'. They want to say 'why can't you acknowledge any of the good things he does?' and we want to say 'his approach to politics is oppositional, if he can't acknowledge good things in my tribe, why is it now incumbent on me to drop the game he won't drop, and acknowledge good things in him?' Etc. Etc.
We really do have a fundamental objection to him that makes it hard to discuss individual issues while pretending he is just a normal politician. The tds allegers are onto something and they are not wrong that we find it hard to see past our antipathy.
That's because you're [now] a conservative, and furthermore, Trump has solidified what the reform movement that actually has a chance of damaging your conservatism is going to look like. I am not really a conservative (or rather, what modern conservatism is right now does not advantage me), and as such have had the exact opposite gut level feeling about Trump for the last 10-ish years. If neoreform wins, I'll likely become a conservative then.
I'm not particularly pleased with the Iran situation given that strikes at a rift in the current neoreform coalition- that being the late-'70s people who just have psychological problems with the Parthians vs. the early-'00s people who spent the past 20 years in that exact same low-level Middle Eastern ego trip warfare that seems to be threatened now.
But I would want the slave-importers punished, I want the slave importation (and offshoring) stopped because it undercuts my wages, I want the socially-accepted answer to "but it's social justice to accept that" to stop being "yes dear/ma'am" like [the '70s progressive-sympathetic liberals] currently do, and I want the current crop of conservatives out of power because they're more interested in DIE-ing than actual results (and will punish anyone who delivers results yet refuses to do so in a DIE manner). They also mishandled the common cold and did a Middle Eastern War's level of economic damage simply because they were angry neoreformers had a better conception of the risks (which cost about as much as the 20 year Middle East war did).
Those things are as offensive to me as Trump is to you, and like the so-called progressives before me I tolerate what takes me no effort to tolerate while offloading the emotional turmoil it causes onto you.
And that's just how conservatives work. I get that the progressives/"liberals" (as they call themselves) have kind of built a strawman around the term for reasons that have a lot to do with the 1960s and 70s (the people that came of age then are currently at the height of their political power, so naturally the lens through which they see the world dominates), but you have to realize that "I don't want to do it because I don't like it aesthetically, and I'm going to dig my heels in no matter what" is not a meme about conservatives for no reason.
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That's wrong for any definition of 'intellectually respectable' or 'how government ought to operate' that doesn't mean 'liked by progressives', and I say that as someone with no small number of frustrations with the administration from the right and left.
Good thing that's not what I meant. Trumpism doesn't even abide its own stated values and principles.
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