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Of Deranged Wolves and Their Shadows
For the last three-and-a-half years, the United States has been ostensibly “governed” by a chief executive who is, to put it bluntly, unfit for the job. Worse still, they’ve all been aware of this.
In 2003, the late Charles Krauthammer coined the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” (BDS), which he described as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.” Fourteen years later, in the first year of the Trump presidency, Krauthammer diagnosed what he called the “most recent offshoot” of BDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. The difference between the two, he wrote, was that the latter threatened to become “endemic” because “Trump Derangement Syndrome is not just general hysteria about the subject, but additionally the inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences on the one hand and signs of psychic pathology on the other.”
This was meant as a swipe at Trump as well as his critics, of course, but was mostly a warning to the “Resistance.” Its inability to differentiate between Trump the politician and Trump the online troll would, he cautioned, cause it to look especially foolish and unhinged. If they could not come to grips with the differences between his official and unofficial personae, they would run the risk of doing something truly stupid and self-destructive.
At present, Krauthammer is being proven especially prophetic.
Because of their unparalleled and exceptionally unbalanced detestation of Donald Trump, the mainstream media, the Democratic political establishment, and indeed, much of the Republican establishment agreed—albeit tacitly—to pretend that Joe Biden was fine, that he was maybe “slowing down” a bit and was “getting older” but was otherwise perfectly fit to be president. They knew Biden was the only one of the Democratic candidates in 2020 who could beat Trump, and so they knew that he had to be made to appear perfectly normal and competent. The catch, of course, is that they also knew that he wasn’t fine and that he wasn’t perfectly normal and competent. Consider, for example, the following from The New York Times:
