Surmounting Trump Derangement Syndrome

[Chemisse]

Our president poses an unprecedented challenge to America’s national equilibrium. His insatiable hunger for attention subjects us to a relentless fusillade of lies, accusations, distortions, braggadocio, threats, bigotry, misogyny, conspiracy theories, reversals of course and half-baked notions spewing from an unbalanced man empowered to start a nuclear war. Silence terrifies him; only an audience makes him real to himself.

That’s the purpose of his presidency ― compelling us to hear his ceaseless ringing in our ears. Metastasized by media, his oppressive omnipresence fractures families, ruins friendships and sours social gatherings. Buffeted without surcease, we risk becoming jittery gerbils on his hamster wheel, unable to distinguish his infinite vulgarities from his gravest harms. His constant din demolishes perspective and obliterates reason. To scour Donald Trump’s behaviors for a coherent philosophy or strategy is to visit our own need for order on his pathological disorder, deepening our disorientation.

In truth, his persona defies all explanation but a self-absorption so consuming that it eviscerates human norms. Trump’s world is a suffocating Orwellian hothouse wherein he expects us to become as bereft of critical thinking as Pavlov’s dogs, reflexively salivating to his latest stimuli regardless of truth or fact ― or whether it contravenes what he said the day before. The presidency empowers him to make his sickness ours.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-patterson-trump-derangement_us_5b3698fce4b08c3a8f6a7d47?ncid=engmodushpmg00000003

If you read through, this editorial cuts through all the crap to give us the four major issues we should be paying attention to instead.

[kentuck]

1. Well stated.

His sickness is ours.

The way the world looks at him is the way the world looks at us. We cannot separate ourselves from that perception. We permit it.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

2. So true...

and I haven't seen surcease in a sentence in a long time. Score one for education.

[Chemisse]

3. Author Richard North Patterson wrote this.

Last edited Wed Jul 4, 2018, 10:54 AM - Edit history (1)

Which I think explains why it is so perfectly constructed.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

4. Well

Thanks for posting it.

[Shrike47]

7. No, author Richard North Patterson wrote it.

[Chemisse]

8. Oops! I will correct that. Thanks.

[northoftheborder]

5. Well put, thorough, descriptive, and informative.

[OregonBlue]

6. I'd say he summed it up pretty thoroughly.

[Girard442]

9. Good article overall.

It's true that obsessing over Trump's failings as a normal, decent human being is largely time wasted, however it is worth noting that people who obsessively picked at nits in the Obama era now seem to be ecstatically happy bathing in the flood of raw sewage that comes from Trump. Give them the time and attention they deserve, which is zero.

[Chemisse]

10. Well stated.

'Flood of raw sewage' is an apt way to describe what we are being hit with each day. It's trully vile and, despite keeping our heads above it, we're still poisoned by its toxic fumes.