President Donald Trump’s reflexive defenders lazily rely on the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” (TDS) as both a schoolyard taunt and a blanket pardon for any fact-based criticism of the president. But the level of mass denial many of them exhibited this week is actually deranged.
A number of the president’s die-hard supporters, as well as some non-MAGA fellow travelers and contrarian apologists, demonstrated an uncanny ability to use a “Jedi mind trick” on themselves. Just as in the original “Star Wars” film, when Obi-Wan Kenobi befuddles an imperial storm trooper by waving his fingers and saying, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” these folks saw real-life evidence of corruption and warmongering, as well as potentially incriminating emails released by the Jeffrey Epstein estate, and collectively told themselves, “There’s nothing there.”
It’s not just members of Trump’s far-right tinfoil hat base who see one thing and decide the opposite is true.
Upon the release this week of emails from the late convicted sex offender Epstein to his co-conspirator, the convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, including one that made curious references to Trump — such as “that dog that hasn’t barked is trump” — several highly influential conspiracy theorists from the “Pizzagate” wing of MAGA world declared the president completely vindicated.
As my colleague Brandy Zadrozny reported: “It’s not the first time in recent months that newly unearthed writings have suggested Trump and Epstein shared closer ties than the president has acknowledged. In July, The Wall Street Journal reported on a 2003 birthday card from Trump to Epstein. The card contained a cryptic message wrapped in an illustration of a naked woman, drawn in bold black marker, about having ‘certain things in common,’ which offered in closing, ‘may every day be another wonderful secret.’ Trump denies authoring the note and has sued the Journal over the story.”
It’s not just members of Trump’s far-right tinfoil hat base who see one thing and decide the opposite is true.
The Trump-curious liberal comic Bill Maher, on his podcast “Club Random” this week, gushed to actress and MAHA queen Cheryl Hines that he appreciates that Trump “really, really does not like war.” In a viral clip from the interview, Maher talks about how, during his infamous White House dinner with the president, Trump told him how affected he was by seeing raw footage of war carnage in Ukraine. Despite Trump’s absurd and untrue boasts about stopping several wars, Maher insisted, “It’s still good that we’re solving them and not starting them.”
Maher’s not a dumb guy, so maybe he’s too busy hosting his HBO show or possibly getting drunk and stoned on his podcast (as is his wont) to notice that in addition to ordering extralegal killings of suspected narcotics traffickers, the Trump administration has sent the world’s largest warship to the Caribbean as senior officials mull a U.S. military attack on Venezuela. And as my colleague Steve Benen noted last month, Trump in his second term has also already “launched preemptive military strikes on targets in Iran; initiated a bombing campaign in Yemen; announced his desire to annex Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal and the Gaza Strip; and spoken publicly about possibly returning U.S. troops to Afghanistan.”
And then there’s the president’s shameless, enormous level of graft during his second term, including but hardly limited to accepting a $400 million jet from the government of Qatar as a personal gift and the billions of dollars his family has acquired from launching its own cryptocurrency — all while he dismantles government watchdog and anti-corruption units. Trump has always relied on the gullibility of strangers, but this week showed how committed Trump’s supporters and sympathetic whataboutists are to not admitting what they see. The Washington Post’s opinion page — recently rechristened as a bastion of “pro-America” and pro-free-market orthodoxy — featured an op-ed by Zachary Karabell this week which essentially argued that because there was rampant corruption in the federal government in the late 1800s and American democracy survived, there’s no reason to believe that the increasingly lawless Trump administration “is an existential threat to democracy.” Karabell writes, “It may be distasteful, possibly even illegal. But there is a wide chasm between illegal, immoral or corrupt and the end of freedom, civil society and democracy as we know it. There is a massive gulf between the thought-control of Pyongyang and TrumpCoin.” In a case of missing the forest for the trees, the egregious personal enrichment of the billionaire president and his family isn’t necessarily an existential threat to democracy. But because he has already attempted a self-coup after losing an election, and because he has allied himself with democracy skeptics and some of the richest people in the world — enriching their businesses with government contracts along the way — Trump’s self-dealing could certainly be included in the basket of threats to the future of the republic. Trump has always relied on the gullibility of strangers (e.g., the glossy TV sheen of the “The Apprentice” convincing many Americans that a real estate magnate best known for his extravagant failures is actually a business genius), but this week showed how committed Trump’s supporters and sympathetic whataboutists are to not admitting what they see. With the confidence of Obi-Wan Kenobi, they tell themselves that the scandals staring them in their face aren’t scandals at all — and that everyone else is deranged to think they are.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for MS NOW. 
