The real epidemic? Trump Derangement Syndrome

FPI / April 16, 2020

So intense is the Left's Trump Derangement Syndrome that "it has divided the nation into two alien camps until there is hardly any longer a national conversation or a united front in the face of the deadly contagion," David Horowitz wrote for Breitbart on April 13.

"Will the nation be able to 're-open' as the president desires, or will it descend into a long-lasting depression with millions unemployed? At the same time, a much greater uncertainty haunts the horizon. This uncertainty is a product of the ferocious hate for the president and his supporters ginned up by the political left ever since the 2016 election," Horowitz wrote.

While all presidents have and will always be the subject of harsh criticism, the attacks launched against Trump "veer on the lunatic, making communication with those who voice them impossible," Horowitz wrote. "It is why the national conversation and a semblance of national unity in the face of threats seem almost hopeless."

Horowitz cited a recent New York Times interview with Bernie Sanders impersonator Larry David: “You know, it’s an amazing thing,” David told the Times, “[Trump] has not one redeeming quality. You could take some of the worst dictators in history, and I’m sure that all of them, you could find one decent quality. Stalin could have had one decent quality, we don’t know!”

Stalin "was a totalitarian dictator who killed 40 million of his own countrymen – in peacetime," Horowitz noted. "How does such a preposterous comparison even occur to a man as intelligent as Larry David? Here are a few of Trump’s obvious redeeming qualities: Trump went out of his way to give a presidential pardon to free Alice Johnson a 63-year-old African American grandmother sentenced to life without parole for a non-violent drug charge. Johnson had served 21 years of her sentence when Trump freed her. Barack Obama by contrast turned a deaf ear to her appeals."

Trump "also shepherded the passage of the First Step Act, something no other Republican would have done, giving thousands of mainly African American prisoners a second chance," Horowitz wrote.

Leftist CNN commentator Van Jones said of Trump's First Step Act: “[S]omething beautiful is happening … It is happening right now, people coming together to help the people who have nothing. And it is amazing.”

In an article in the New York Review of Books titled “Vector in Chief,” Finian O’Toole describes Trump thus: “Trump’s narcissism, mendacity, bullying, and malignant incompetence were obvious before the coronavirus crisis and they have been magnified rather than moderated in his surreal response to a catastrophe whose full gravity he failed to accept until March 31, when it had become horribly undeniable.”

Horwoitz wrote: "False. Trump banned travel from China and declared the virus 'a national health emergency' on January 31, two months earlier – actions which caused Democrats like Biden and Pelosi and their lackey press to call him a xenophobe and a racist. O’Toole references to Trump’s March 31 remarks but ignores his earlier declaration on January 31.

"O’Toole then concocts a bizarre argument that Trump’s alleged later decision to take the epidemic seriously is merely a self-interested necessity because his supporters are in the category of the most vulnerable to the disease." O'Toole writes: “For we must bear in mind that Trump’s ‘real people,’ the ones who make up his electoral base, are disproportionately prone to the chronic illnesses (the ‘underlying conditions’) that make Covid-19 more likely to prove fatal.”

So, Horowitz noted, "even Trump’s good deeds are bad deeds, dictated by his voracious self-interest: People who are sick vote for Trump, while Trump for selfish reasons is forced to protect them."

In 2016, 52 percent of voters over the age of 45 voted for Trump. "In addition to being more prone to illness, these older people have active memories of the disasters of socialism, went to schools that still taught American principles and the American Constitution rather than Rules for Radicals, and also have a healthy understanding of why America needs a strong military rather than the degraded one Obama left as his legacy," Horowitz wrote.

Free Press International