The director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were found dead in their Los Angeles home yesterday. The couple were discovered with their throats slit open; a knife was found nearby on the premises and their son Nick is being held as a suspect. The nation has been stunned by the brutal circumstances of the Reiners' deaths – though the requisite level of empathy is apparently yet to reach 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
One of the most striking things about Trump 2: The Trumpening is how few characters are still on board from the Donald’s first term. Other than the President himself, it’s almost a completely different cast. Even the First Lady only rarely appears, as though she’s contractually obliged as a guest star for the occasional episode. But there’s one very important exception: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. And while Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicts millions of Americans, Miller Derangement Syndrome is, as they used to say during Covid, a comorbidity. MDS may have reached its peak earlier this month when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to Miller as a “clown.
Like many commentators who have struggled to understand the reasons for the inveterate hatred of Donald Trump among the swank people who actually run the country, I have generally come up with two answers. The first is aesthetic. Trump does not look like, act like or talk like a typical politician. He has a funny hairdo, seems to have a fake tan and his taste in clothes and food are infra dignitatem. He consorts with people who organize fights and other riff-raff. Ronald Reagan was a movie actor, something for which he was mercilessly pilloried by the New Yorker-New York Times set in the run-up to and throughout his presidency. But Donald Trump hosted a demotic reality TV show, which was even worse.
November 7, 2020 To my dear parents, Victory. Uttering the word feels strange after four long years of battle. But we persisted. After our devastating ‘loss’ in 2016, I ordered my pink-knit pussy hat from Etsy and answered the call to arms. I remember learning of the atrocities suffered under other dictators whose statues we’ve toppled, such as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. But after the horrors I’ve witnessed online, I would trade places with them in an instant. It’s hard to describe daily life when you’re living in a war. For four years I’ve woken up in my Brooklyn apartment, heart heavy with the knowledge that I am living under the tyrannical rule of a madman. Is this how Anne Frank felt?
As 2020 nears its conclusion, many things are coming to an end: Donald Trump’s presidency, America’s superpower status, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s once-remarkable record of being alive. Now, add another one to the list: the Krassenstein family is quitting Twitter.The Krassenstein family were humans who could only exist in the age of Donald Trump. That is, if they were really human at all; Cockburn is skeptical. Their total obsession with Donald Trump suggested that, like an ant consumed by the cordyceps fungus, their human self may have been hollowed out and wholly replaced by an id of pure anti-Trump derangement.Anyone foolish enough to regularly read Donald Trump’s tweets has seen the Krassensteins.
Trump hatred has been with us since he announced his candidacy five years ago. But we can all feel the escalating fever pitch of fury that has marked the weeks leading up to the election. In social settings, friends of otherwise sound temperament seem uncharacteristically uncontrolled in their visceral rage when referring to the President. Just mention his name and you'll be interrupted with 'Oh I hate him, he's a sociopath' or the requisite 'If he wins, I swear I'm moving out of the country!'The question, I always wonder, is why this intense level of revulsion? It is so deep, so impervious to reasoned discussion. Policy differences can’t account for this level of skin crawling. The conversation is really never about SALT deductions or fracking. Even abortion is of secondary concern.
There's a joke about a guy who gets anxious on airplanes. The passenger next to him, trying to be helpful, suggests ways he might relax. A drink? A Xanax? A movie, or a nice nap? The anxious man shakes his head, annoyed. He can't relax. He can't lose focus. He can only sit, gripping the arm rests, staring straight ahead in a state of white-knuckled, sphincter clenching terror. Why? Because his terror is the only thing keeping the plane in the air. This notion of anxious acting-out as our sole line of defense against chaos — call it the Control Freak’s Fallacy — isn’t new, but it is certainly having a moment in the run-up to the 2020 election.
This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Last summer, at a secretive dinner in Manhattan, I heard a New York Times staffer regale our table with some tales. He told us about how a dozen or so people had, like him, faced the most perilous horror imaginable for a blue checkmark Twitter person. They’d been canceled. For some, it was a tweet. For others, posing in a photograph with a Republican, or clicking ‘like’ on a Facebook post written by a known transphobe, or perhaps expressing an unhealthy familiarity with the work of Milton Friedman. For the Times staffer, he deigned to question gender theory in the office and sent half his team hyperventilating into paper bags and the other privately giving him the thumbs up.
This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. There’s an old joke about Democrats and Republicans that might help us understand the anti-Trump rantings of pop-culture icons such as Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen. Two old guys are talking politics. One asks the other which party he supports. ‘The Democratic party,’ he responds. ‘Why so?’ ‘Because my daddy voted for the Democratic party, and my granddaddy voted for the Democratic party. So I vote for the Democratic party.’ ‘That’s ridiculous,’ rejoined the Republican voter. ‘So, if your daddy had been a hoss thief, and your granddaddy had been a hoss thief, does that mean you’d be a hoss thief, too?
Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: 'If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.' In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.
Hold the MAGA hat. Feel its embroidery. Try it on. Now look at yourself in the mirror. Tell me your stress levels right now. A California mental health professional believes a presumed joke on the internet is quietly being taken very seriously by colleagues. ‘I’ve seen this a few times over the last couple years, and I finally put two and two together,’ the mental health worker told me. The source, who requested anonymity citing workplace bigotry, was scrolling through a private message board for professionals in the field and saw a therapist asking where to find ‘Trump paraphernalia to be used in sessions with patients.’ ‘I realized, oh wow, they’re doing exposure therapy to treat TDS!’ the source said.
