The Great Derangement

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, October 23, 2025

 

There was a period not too long ago — perhaps ten years back, or maybe 15 — when one could not move without coming across a parody of a British World War II–era poster that featured the words Keep Calm and Carry On emblazoned beneath a stylized Tudor Crown. For a while this advice was ubiquitous. Variously, we were instructed to keep calm and wash our hands; to keep calm and drive safely; to keep calm and drink wine; and even, at Christmastime, to keep calm and pop Bubble Wrap. The details varied, but the overall injunction did not: The message, all told, was that panicking does not help anyone.

 

It has long struck me as rather amusing that this trend peaked, and then disappeared from memetic use, around 2016, at the exact moment when we might have benefited the most from its prescription. For it was in that idiosyncratic year that Donald Trump was first elected president of the United States and, in response, that so many of the people who work in and around political journalism began slowly but surely to lose their minds.

 

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There is no doubt that Trump was — is — an aberration. He is disruptive, in ways both salutary and disgraceful. He is incoherent, in ways that attract the disaffected but can wear on the nerves of the politically systematic. He is capricious, in ways that sit uneasily within our Newtonian Constitution and sometimes challenge it outright. Famously, this magazine did not want him to become the Republican nominee in 2016, and, long after he prevailed, it has continued to find fault with many of his actions. At discrete points in time, Trump has made us glad, sad, optimistic, angry, ashamed, frustrated, and amused. At no point, however, has he made us deranged. That, mercifully, has been a fate reserved for others.

 

And boy have they leaned into it! Properly understood, one’s feelings about a political candidate ought to become less binary once his election has been confirmed. Prior to the count, the key question for commentators is “Yes or no?” Afterwards, it is “What now?” Like it or not, Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and that he is now the president of the United States is not a preference or an opinion or a willingness of the heart; it is a stone-cold fact of the universe. Under our system of government, Trump took office on January 20, 2025, and, unless he dies or resigns or is impeached, he will remain there until January 20, 2029. As opinion writers, our role is neither to sanctify him nor to chase him to the gates of hell but to push him toward decisions that comport with our conception of virtue. If he does things we like, we ought to praise him. If he does things we dislike, we ought to criticize him. Throughout this work, we ought to strive to stay consistent with our stated convictions and to say only what we believe to be true.

 

To observe that this responsibility has been abdicated by a stupendous number of figures within the journalistic, academic, and political worlds is, at this point, almost banal. Indeed, to look around the media world in the year of our Lord 2025 is to wonder whether, for the last decade, the green rooms of New York City and Washington, D.C., have doubled as operating theaters for the administration of lobotomies. Examine the whole range of previously sober personalities who have been thoroughly demented by Trump and a common characteristic becomes clear: To a man, they have subordinated their consciences to the advancement of a tedious goal.

 

For Trump’s critics, this has involved embracing all manner of ideas that they previously considered grotesque. It is, of course, entirely reasonable to believe that Trump is unfit for the presidency. It’s reasonable, too, to be disillusioned with the movement — and the political party — that has made Trump its central figure. But to abandon every extrinsic moral precept that one held because it might, in some attenuated sense, intersect with Trump or his party? That is fanaticism. Politics, ultimately, is about policy. Sometimes, in the interest of preventing the elevation of certain personnel, one is called upon to vote for candidates whose policy positions are at odds with one’s preferences. But one is never obliged to adopt those policy positions as one’s own. In America, our politicians are the instruments of our will. One may, at times, find cause to mistrust the instrument, but to abandon the will itself is to mistake the herald for the proclamation, the hand for the deed, the executor for the execution. It is, in short, to hollow oneself out.

 

Consider, by way of example, the inexplicable case of Bill Kristol and the fate of Roe v. Wade. In 1998, in a piece titled “Roe Must Go,” Kristol laid out a comprehensive case against the constitutionalization of legal abortion that, on its own terms, sat apart from the quotidian politics of the hour. “The hard fact,” Kristol wrote, “is that we have now in America a morally problematic and constitutionally unsound regime of abortion on demand.” Abortion, he proposed, was an issue of such “profound moral, political, and constitutional importance” that if conservatives were to prove unable to “earn a mandate to overturn Roe and move towards a postabortion America, then, in truth, there will be no conservative future.” Why? Because “Roe stands in the way of what conservatives most want to bring about — a politics of republican self-government, constitutional norms, and moral decency.” The project of reversing Roe, Kristol suggested, was “Lincolnian in character, principled but incremental, appealing to the better angels of our nature.”

 

Moreover, such a move was imperative if the United States were to maintain its democracy. By removing abortion from the usual electoral processes, Kristol submitted, the Supreme Court had “attempted entirely to foreclose a political struggle,” “expressed animosity even to continued political debate,” and “granted victory almost completely to one side, precluding any hope of significant progress by the other.” Because “Roe is the very centerpiece of the modern expansion of judicial power,” overturning it was “crucial to reviving republican self-government” in areas as diverse as “assisted suicide, gay rights, cloning, the legal status of the family.” Should Roe be nixed, Kristol observed, the Court would not be intervening on the other side but removing itself from the area completely. In that event, he confirmed, “the overturning of Roe would merely send the abortion fight back to the states, and to Congress — which would by no means guarantee triumph for the pro-life cause.”

 

Twenty-four years later, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court did precisely what Kristol had suggested. In response, Kristol said . . . well, he said nothing positive whatsoever. He publicly criticized Justice Clarence Thomas’s sole concurrence for having drawn the same implications as he had back in 1998; he complained that the opinion contained “no solid limiting principle” — despite having cast the position that its author took as being “crucial to reviving republican self-government”; and, having considered the matter for a couple of days, he linked approvingly to a piece on his website, The Bulwark, that decried “the radicalism of the majority’s decision in Dobbs” on the grounds that it “plunges a fateful (and deeply personal) choice into the cauldron of the culture war.” Two years later, reflecting on the second anniversary of a development that he had persistently deemed imperative to a “conservative future,” Kristol proposed that President Joe Biden ought to make the case that “it’s because of Trump judges that Roe v. Wade was overturned”; that “if Trump gets to pick more judges, more freedoms will be at risk”; and, to ensure that there are “no more Trump judges,” Biden should insist that “we can’t elect Trump president.” A few months later, Kristol made the case in relation to Kamala Harris. “Reproductive freedom is a crucial issue,” he asseverated, “and a winning one, and the Harris campaign would be foolish not to make it a closing one in these last couple of days.”

 

This, to use the technical term, was bonkers. It was monomaniacal, myopic, even totalitarian. Naturally, Kristol was not compelled to vote for Trump simply because Trump had appointed the judges that guaranteed Roe’s demise. But to repudiate his own desires? To decry his own legal, moral, and political theories? To insist that the justices who had written and approved the opinion for which he had pined had, in so doing, made the case for the worldview of their opponents? That was a form of madness. At no point in the intervening time had Kristol suggested that he’d evolved on the matter. All that had changed was that the cause was now temporarily connected to Donald Trump.

 

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Alas, this way of approaching politics has proven extremely seductive since 2015 — especially to those who conceive of politics as a team sport. For every person who has adjusted his political outlook to match his disdain for Trump, there is an equivalent who has adjusted his political outlook to match his ardor. It is difficult to convey how extraordinarily unsettling it was, back in the summer of 2016, to watch, impotently, as figure after figure after figure sedulously brought his or her opinions into alignment with whatever Trump happened to announce that afternoon. The details were irrelevant: Whether the topic was abortion, taxes, tariffs, foreign policy, free speech, or federalism, thousands upon thousands of people on the right proved willing to bend themselves into the unholiest of shapes in their attempt to match the moment.

 

Disastrously, this eagerness survived Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. Thus did Maria Bartiromo and the late Lou Dobbs, of Fox Business, and Sean Hannity, of Fox News, consent to air absurd and baseless conspiracy theories about the supposedly “stolen” election that they knew full well were utterly false. Thus did Dinesh D’Souza, a smart man whose early books were rather good, make a preposterous movie, 2000 Mules, in which he fabricated evidence that phony absentee ballots had illegitimately handed the race to Joe Biden. Thus did Rudy Giuliani, once celebrated for his sobriety, and affectionately nicknamed “America’s Mayor,” agree to transform himself into a bankrupt, degraded, twice-indicted national joke.

 

Why? A desire to belong. A desire to be relevant. A desire to avoid being shouted at by one’s allies. The adrenaline rush that comes with being a part of the in-group. The belief — sadly omnipresent in contemporary politics — that one’s opponents represent an existential threat to the nation and thus that any dissent from one’s own side is the equivalent of giving aid and succor to the enemy. Whatever. They have their reasons. Always, they have their reasons. But that does not make the behavior admirable.

 

At the Diet of Worms, Martin Luther declared, “Here I stand; I can do no other.” In their turn, the Professional Trump Sycophants declare, “Where does he stand? I shall follow.” In so doing, they become fun-house-mirror versions of their enemies, the Professional Trump Haters. In their dotage, both have become enfeebled iron filings; the lackeys rushing stupidly toward every snap of the magnet, the antagonists scurrying away at equal speed. Together, they play an endless game of Non Sequitur, in which each round begins, “Donald Trump says, therefore . . .” A decade ago, George Conway was a serious right-of-center lawyer. Today, he wears a T-shirt declaring, “I am Antifa.” Donald Trump says, therefore. In 2021, Tucker Carlson told a friend that “there isn’t really an upside to Trump” and confessed, “I hate him passionately.” In 2024, he spoke at the Republican National Convention and described Trump as “the bravest man,” the “leader of a nation,” and “a wonderful person.” Donald Trump says, therefore. This is not argument, or critique, or inquiry. It is not resolve. It is subservience, servitude, subjugation, servility. What a strange spectacle it has been. How preferable the alternative remains. Keep calm and . . . well, on second thought, never mind.