"What if people with 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' in 2016 were right about pretty much everything, but premature about the timing?"

"What if people with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in 2016 were right about pretty much everything," asks Nick Catoggio, "but premature about the timing?"

The Pax Americana is in flames and burned almost beyond recognition. And with a majority in both Houses of Congress willingly removing the Executive's constitutional guardrails against more destruction—politically, economically, globally—it sure does seem like Trump 2.0 is "shaping up to be what doomsayers thought his first term would be."

Yikes!

Just look:

• Trump will appoint a Cabinet of lunatics. He did try in Trump 1.0. But eventually almost all left in a fit of sanity, leaving only their distaste at the buffoon. 
Not so this term, in which "Kash Patel is the Senate-confirmed head of the FBI, joining embarrassments like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as America’s key policymakers."
• Trump will engage in grotesque corruption. Trump 1.0 did try, but that pales into insignificance compared to "the breathtaking grifts he’s running now. Just yesterday, he announced a new 'U.S. Crypto Reserve,' a blatant scam to use taxpayer money to boost the value of investments held by his crypto-bro fans. 
Meanwhile, the main bureaucratic 'reform' initiative in his administration is being run by a mega-billionaire with immense financial interests in industries regulated by the very agencies whose databases he’s been rummaging through for weeks."

Also: 

• Trump will let grudges and vendettas drive his policies. Check: To a degree unmatched in his first presidency, Trump’s new government brazenly divides politics into friends and enemies. Friends show their appreciation; enemies are apt to lose every public privilege that it’s within his power to deny them.
• Trump will govern chaotically and malevolently. Check: "never did the first President Trump embark on a policy project as haphazard and destructive as DOGE, and not until Election Day 2020 did he do anything as nakedly malicious as pardoning violent loyalists."
• Trump will destroy NATO and the American-led international order. Check: "It took until his second term, specifically this past Friday, for him to fully immolate the United States’ credibility as leader of the free world."

Check, check, and check again.

Trump 2.0, summarises Catoggio,

is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability. Since his first term in office, the president has gained a considerable degree of legal impunity from the Supreme Court, almost limitless political impunity from his supporters and the cowards in Congress who represent them, absolute administrative impunity from the slavish cronies with whom he’s staffed his government, and electoral impunity from the fact that, one way or another, he’ll never face voters again. ...
    And so, six weeks in, Trump’s second term as president already looks like the sum of all fears that [never-Trumpers] felt nine years ago. If there ever were such a thing as irrational 'Trump Derangement Syndrome,' it died in the Oval Office on Friday.

You'll remember what happened then? You know, that the Western Alliance was split asunder  on national television in a fit of Ukraine-splaining”?

Shaking down Ukraine for mineral interests had a distinct Trump 1.0 feel, not unlike when he demanded that allies with U.S. troops stationed on their territory increase their payments to Washington. Because he perceives no strategic American interest in allying with liberal nations, he needs to believe that it’s in our financial interest to justify continuing that alliance. He’s a famously transactional politician; if you want something from him, you need to hand him some sort of victory, ideally involving cash.
    But dressing down Zelensky publicly on Friday had more of a Trump 2.0 feel. It wasn’t about finances. If it had been, Trump wouldn’t have refused to proceed with the minerals deal after things went south in the Oval Office. It was about 'respect.' Zelensky didn’t show enough of it, supposedly, and that was reason enough for the president and vice president to burn down the transatlantic alliance that’s prevailed since World War II on live television.
    If I had told you in 2016 that America would switch sides in a major war involving Russia and part of the reason would be that the guy we’re allied with didn’t wear a suit to a meeting, you would have accused me of the most hysterical case of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' you’d ever seen. Yet that’s what happened.

Yes, Orange Man really is Bad.

Really Bad.  You might even say: deranged.

I can't help but think back to 2016 when life-long Republican, the late humorist PJ O'Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton.: 

I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, ... She's wrong about absolutely everything. But she's wrong within normal parameters.

"The paradox of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is that the phrase is used only by the very people who are suffering from it."

"[W]hen you make an argument like this, a certain type of person will immediately dismiss you with the term 'Trump Derangement Syndrome,' or TDS. ... This is obviously a lazy attempt at deflection—a phrase invoked to avoid having to think about evidence of Trump’s unfitness for office. ... You hear it from die-hard supporters and random people on the internet. But I think it is already distorting some of the press coverage of this election.
   "Here is the problem. What Trump is saying and doing is so unhinged—for example, repeating wild stories that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats—that if all you do is simply describe it, you are the one who sounds crazy.
    "Trump says, for example, that he will use the military to jail his critics. ... * Or maybe Trump says he thinks we should suspend the Constitution ... ** Then your listener says, 'Oh, come on, you’re totally exaggerating. You’re suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.' But in dismissing you, your listener is moving himself farther away from an accurate grasp of reality. He is the one becoming—dare I say it?—deranged. ...
    "Donald Trump has intuitively mastered the techniques of propaganda, which include the Big Lie ... and also the Incredible Truth: a fact so outrageous that people refuse to accept its reality. If ... t if you go way beyond that to do or say something completely insane, no one will believe you’re doing it—even as you do it right out in the open.

“Trump Derangement Syndrome” has its origins in 'Bush Derangement Syndrome,' which was used to describe the truly hyperbolic reaction on the far left to George W. Bush ... But what Trump realised is: What happens if you yourself embrace the hyperbole and go out and embody it? All the rules intended to keep political discussion productive by protecting against hyperbole then work to protect you—and to protect you precisely because you embraced the worst possible views.
    "This is the fate that has been suffered by Godwin’s Law. ... you can talk about immigrants 'poisoning the blood' of the country and foreigners bringing in 'bad genes.' Have two of your chief supporters host and recommend an interview with an open Nazi apologist. Go onto a livestream with a guy who regularly hosts neo-Nazis. Talk about how you wish you had the kind of generals Hitler had. Refer to Nazis as very fine people. And then scream about how unfair it is when anyone points this out. ...
    "The paradox of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is that the phrase is used only by the very people who are suffering from it."

~ Robert Tracinski from his post 'The Anatomy of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”'

* Trump: "I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the—and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military…. The worst people are the enemies from within, the sleaze bags, the guy that you’re going to elect to the Senate, shifty Adam Schiff."

** Trump: “A massive fraud of this type and magnitude [i.e., the election he actually lost] allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”