The most dismaying thing about Donald Trump, when you think about it, is not the man himself but the popularity that has put him into high office. There have already been a lot of right-wing nutjobs (Lyndon LaRouche, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, David Icke), media provocateurs (Michael Moore, Bill Maher), and reality-TV stars you might love to hate (Simon Callow, Gordon Ramsay), but none of them ever won admiration comparable to the cult of personality – literally presidential-level – enjoyed by Trump. His infamous 2016 boast, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” today seems almost an understatement.

But since that time a pattern of excuse and evasion among Trump’s supporters has emerged to reveal, if not vulnerability to argument, at least a pathological refusal to engage with it. Contrary to the supposedly devastating rebuttal lobbed by the garden-variety MAGA moron, the real Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicts not his opponents but his admirers. Every US president has faced criticism, of course; Trump and his adherents are uniquely defensive about it. Consider this taxonomy of the rationalizations, denials, and schoolyard comebacks that have been offered over the years in response to the latest Trumpian outrage:

“He doesn’t mean it; it’s just rhetoric.” This has been the standard hedge since the 2016 election campaign, suggesting that the Orange Man’s most offensive insults or unhinged proposals are no more than refreshingly plain talk from a maverick politician who’s not afraid to speak his mind. It’s how Trump’s fan base gets to have it both ways: they’ll celebrate his crude language and his impulsive comments (about annexing Canada or Greenland, “Russia, if you’re listening…,” “Blood coming out of her wherever,” etc., etc.), but they can always disavow the comments should they get called out. If the public likes what Trump says, then he’s a genius, but if they don’t, then hey, lighten up, snowflakes. The point, as always, is to declare victory just by not getting caught.

“He does mean it, but he can’t do anything about it because the rigged System won’t let him.” A slightly more sophisticated variation on the above, deployed more in his bumbling first administration than today’s neo-monarchical reign, this defence holds that any really reckless Trumpian order will be checked by institutional barriers. Dodging consequences again, supporters can outwardly credit their man for his brilliant plans to drain the swamp, build a wall, ban Muslims, rename the Gulf of Mexico, and Make America Great Again, and at the same time blame his libtard opponents for blocking them. Later, in private, they’ve been grateful for the guardrails they know keep the US economy from collapsing and nuclear war from devastating the earth. This tactic may have outlived its usefulness in 2025, however, when there’s not much of a rigged System left for Trump’s keyboard warriors to complain about – or, when they’re offline, to secretly thank.

“Even if he does carry through with it, well, it’s no worse than what his enemies in the Elite/the Deep State/the Left have already done.” Worth a shot. Even leading Democrats and Trump critics are now acknowledging that their emphasis on racial and gender grievance, their trust in the power of prosecutions, and their deference to a coastal and Ivy League leadership class, may have cost them a generation’s worth of support. By this formulation, Trump only represents ordinary people’s righteous backlash: “I am your retribution.” Except all that wokeness, legalism, and meritocracy could have been challenged – indeed, regularly was challenged – through the normal channels of political and cultural debate, by responsible political and cultural actors. The pendulum was going to swing anyway; Trump and his enablers are just riding its momentum to the other extreme, and then they’ll keep going. At least Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, allegedly evil empresses of the Woke Left Deep-State Elite, voluntarily relinquished power when they accepted the results of elections. That’s the difference right there. Does anyone really think Donald Trump has a similar respect for the basic rules of democracy?

“Sure they’d say that, they’re part of the conspiracy against him.” The members of the sinister anti-Trump cabal plotting to undermine his every move include Mitt Romney; Tom Hanks; Taylor Swift; airline pilot “Sully” Sullenberger; Anthony Fauci; Liz Cheney; former Trump administration officials Mike Pence, John Bolton, and Jim Mattis; George W. Bush; Jeb Bush; former US Senator Jeff Flake; Meghan McCain, daughter of the late presidential candidate John McCain; conservative commentators David Frum, William Kristol, Bret Stephens, and George Will; numerous academic historians, economists, and legal scholars; many major media outlets including big-city newspapers, national TV networks, and long-running magazines; multiple federally-appointed US judges; and roughly half the adult citizens of the United States, give or take a few million. It’s hard to imagine a broader coalition of people condemning Trump from such varied perspectives – personal, moral, political, Constitutional – yet somehow Trump’s devotees keep resorting to the classic conspiracist “They’ve got to you too!” rejoinder, as if all the condemners have succumbed to the same orchestrated campaign of misinformation. Many politicians have had ardent backers, but, outside North Korea or the USSR, no politician has had backers to whom any bad decision, any character flaw, or any outside opinion, is so literally unthinkable.

“It does sound kind of extreme, but it kind of makes sense from some angles.” In a nutshell, this is the argument of Trumpism’s intellectual apologists, among them the normally insightful New York TImes columnist Ross Douthat and Trump’s own Yale-educated Vice-President, J. D. Vance. Nice try, guys. The whole crazy-like-a-fox justification – sure, Trump seems irrational, impulsive, and ignorant, but that’s just his wily scheme to rattle his adversaries – is more of a desperate exercise in self-deception on the part of people who’ve publicly committed to him; certainly they’d never have given the same benefit of the doubt to similarly buffoonish but less successful politicians like Ross Perot, Sarah Palin, or Rick Santorum. There has to be a method to his madness, is the subtext, or else we’ve sure been conned. Likewise, Trump’s social media trolls trot out some version of this line (e.g. “Just you wait,” “Don’t underestimate him,” whatever) after every Trumpian fuckup. Their abject loyalty is too well-documented to walk back, so they have to double down.

“Trump Derangement Syndrome” When all else fails, drop the TDS-bomb. The surface implication of this brushoff is that the Trump detractor is so consumed by hostility that he or she can’t make an objective judgement. Yet unconsidered is the issue of why anyone might actually be so consumed: Is it because Donald Trump is a megalomaniac, a narcissist? Because he’s a vain, ranting old man unfit for his job? Could it be his obvious corruption, his blatant claims to presidential privilege and rejection of presidential responsibility? His background as a tabloid celebrity with no experience in public service? Maybe it’s his biography of unearned wealth, bankruptcies, adultery, and business fraud, or his open admiration for foreign autocrats, or his brazen obliviousness to government protocols, international commitments, standards of courtesy, the rule of law, and the truth? Doesn’t the genuine derangement lie in not seeing any of those, and in never pointing them out? Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is the last refuge of the wilfully blind.

In 1964 the US Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater ran on the slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right.” Goldwater seems like a paragon of integrity and reasonableness now, but at the time he was considered an extremist, and jokers on Lyndon Johnson’s winning team soon pitched an alternative: “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” So with Donald Trump. To his paid and unpaid champions in America and around the world, I say, despite your spin, your alibis, and your excuses, deep down, you know he’s a clown.