Have We Found a Cure for TDS?

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, December 19, 2024

 

It turns out that there is a cure for Trump Derangement Syndrome, and all it takes is Trump winning a second time.

 

Back in 2012, Joe Biden used to talk about the Republican “fever breaking,” and, in 2020, he promised that the GOP would have a post-Trump “epiphany.”

 

Instead, it is the anti-Trump fever that has, if not broken, significantly subsided, at least for the time being.

 

The ascent of someone who we were told, just several weeks ago, was a supposed fascist threatening the existence of American democracy has been met with remarkably subdued press coverage.

 

Since his rise in 2015, this is the least hostility toward, and least heavy breathing about, Trump that we’ve ever witnessed, and he’s about to embark on four years in power with fewer “guardrails” than the first time around.

 

Of all the people in our politics that you might have expected to earn “strange new respect,” Donald Trump would be last on the list — but here we are.

 

The attitude certainly isn’t, If you can’t beat him, join him; rather, it is, If you can’t beat him, maybe we should at least examine some of our prior assumptions.

 

That a candidate wins an election shouldn’t be presumed to tell us anything about the merits of that candidate; dreadful people win elections all the time.

 

Still, in a democratic republic, it is natural to extend a measure of sympathetic understanding to anyone who wins 50 percent plus 1 in a big, national election — to acknowledge the legitimacy of how a majority of the country is thinking and feeling, if nothing else.

 

This dynamic is behind some of the new tone about Trump, who won the popular vote (if not quite 50 percent), and did so with gains among groups — minorities and young people — that progressives value.

 

A straw in the wind is a typically well-done column by Bret Stephens in the New York Times announcing his defection from Never Trump. (Van Jones has also been a notable voice advocating rethinking the common media and political class view of Trump.)

 

There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, and it’s admirable to do it forthrightly with a full public explanation the way Stephens does. But it’s notable that everything that he points out that will make him have a more mixed view on Trump going forward (the positives in his foreign policy record in his first term, the excesses of the Left, etc.) was readily discernible prior to November 5.

 

I keep going back to the Madison Square Garden rally. There was the power of the Trump phenomenon set out for everyone to see. Trump clearly had generated mass appeal and enthusiasm, or the arena and surrounding streets wouldn’t have been packed; the overwhelming sense of the rally was “joyful”; and Trump’s remarks were upbeat and on message.

 

Yet it was portrayed as a Nazi-adjacent event that had handed the election to Kamala Harris because a warm-up comic made a tasteless joke about Puerto Ricans. This wasn’t missing a few subtleties; it was basically a combination of self-delusion and active deception in the service of potential electoral advantage.

 

If Trump’s relative media honeymoon means that the press will lie about him less, that will be a very good thing indeed, although I’m skeptical how long this new dispensation will last.

 

This is not to deny any of Trump’s flaws. Another effect of Trump winning is that it avoided a display of his very worst tendencies. If he had lost again, it would have been a return to the post–2020 election miasma of wild theories and half-baked legal arguments — 2000 Mules all over again. Victory suits him much better.

 

And, for now at least, it has occasioned a healthy reckoning — the media never should have made fear and loathing their standard for covering Donald Trump in the first place.