By Douglas V. Gibbs
The Election of 2024 revealed that Donald J. Trump is among the most popular political figures in the history of America – and as a result of the election and the realization that Donald J. Trump was going away no time soon, the left is even more so losing their collective mind.
Trump first formally announced his candidacy for President of the United States the first time on June 16, 2015, with a campaign rally and a speech at Trump Tower in New York City. In the moments before his announcement, he came down a golden escalator at Trump Tower, a moment that has since become a metonym for his announcement, proclaiming that he wanted to build a great big beautiful wall. My wife, born in Mexico, and the daughter of legal immigrants who came to America when she was but a small child back in the sixties, pointed at the television screen and proclaimed to me, “That’s my guy.”
My lovely wife of over thirty years at the time had naturalized less than a decade before, and took voting very seriously. The ability to vote was among the primary reasons she made the plunge for U.S. Citizenship after all, considering that I had told her for most of our marriage that I didn’t want to hear what she had to say about politics until she could participate in the election process. Upon her declaration to support Donald J. Trump, I quipped that her decision was such a rookie move for a candidate who was nothing more than an outsider who had no chance to win the Republican Primary. I then proclaimed that my political intellect had already chosen who was the clear winner, and announced that winning political powerhouse to be Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who would end his campaign abruptly on September 21, only three months later. His campaign had seen a rapid decline in support as the popularity of Trump as candidate was on the rise, citing the need to “clear the field” for a “positive conservative message” to emerge as an alternative to who had become the front-runner, Donald Trump.
I fancied myself at the time of being pretty sharp as a political pundit, but my lessons regarding Donald Trump had only just begun.
Trump was an unknown, and while he talked a good game, serious political pundits scoffed at his ability to actually ultimately pull off the win. He had a silent majority that folks like me had not opened their ears to truly hear. The media, the pollsters and the Republican elites never saw what was coming – even though it was right in front of them the entire time.
The establishment from both political parties simply saw him as a reality TV star who had no prior government or military experience. He couldn’t win the election, they scoffed; these kinds of outsiders never had a chance. He would fizzle out faster than third-party candidates. He was nothing more than an H. Ross Perot, John Anderson or Ralph Nader who simply was trying to be an outsider that found his way to the inside of one of the two major political parties. He was a non-conservative, many believed, who would probably steal the vote of many Republicans and allow a more moderate candidate to win the primary; a potential that, according to the experts, may destroy the Republican Party’s chances against Hillary Clinton who everyone knew was the inevitable heir to Barack Obama in the White House.
Trump was a potential threat to the whole system. He was a bull in a china shop who served as a negative influence in the Republican Party during a critical presidential election that may otherwise have had a chance to narrowly swing in a direction to beat the Democrats. Besides, argued a few of my hardcore Republican Party buddies, “He’s a Trojan Horse who is claiming to be conservative. If he got into office, he’d be worse than Hillary. He’s been schmoozing with the Democrats his entire life.”
In my assessment, as I looked back at Trump’s history as a businessman, I couldn’t determine where he stood politically. While he had indeed been a Democrat at times during his life, he said things in past interviews that echoed what he was saying during the 2016 Election Season. I decided at the time he was neither Red or Blue; as a businessman his favorite color was the color of money, and it turned out that both Republicans and Democrats influence the green he sought for his projects, so he spent time with many folks on both sides of the aisle. As a New Yorker, however, that usually meant hobnobbing with Democrats.
The establishment elites could never visualize Trump as President of the United States, so they could not see him winning the GOP nomination – until he did – or winning the White House – until he did. Their instincts told them that Hillary Clinton was the heir apparent, and they knew that to be the truth because all of the information being spewed by the media validated that ultimate inevitability. Their expectations couldn’t possibly be wrong – they had opinion polls to support their predictions regarding the outcome of the election.
Even members of the Republican Party who supported Trump’s candidacy back then could ever envision him prevailing. Very talented GOP operatives were insisting that the votes were simply not there for the political outsider.
Trump ended up winning the GOP Primary, and then defied even his own internal models by winning the Presidential Election despite staffers at the Republican National Committee telling reporters the best Trump could pull off was 240 Electoral College votes. The odds regarding winning the presidency was about 1 in 5, the experts proclaimed.
They insisted, despite his surprising popularity inside the very confused Republican Party that had somehow fallen into the hands of the Tea Party and Christian Conservatives who seemed to overlook his harsh personality, he had no chance to beat Hillary. She was going to win the swing states, they said. For example, he would lose Florida, an important swing state, by four points – a state he wound up winning by one point by the time the dust settled.
The average guy – the blue collar workers – gave us clues that Trump would end up winning in 2016. They were telling people that they didn’t know a single Clinton supporter. The Midwest Swing State voters talked about how much they loved Bill, but loathed Hillary. Republican voters who had been staying home for years were suddenly chanting that they would vote for Trump. Even those who didn’t pay much attention to politics recognized that Hillary Clinton was a pathological liar. But, those people were not being polled, or their responses were not being registered in the polls. So, assumptions were made, and Trump’s win shocked everyone except those who were paying attention beneath the radar.
The anti-Trump hysteria had already begun to bubble to the surface back when Donald J. Trump first announced his candidacy for President of the United States back in 2015. Prior to that moment, Mr. Trump was loved by the people who would establish him as their mortal enemy down the road. But, they didn’t see him as a danger at that time, yet.
Trump was simply a billionaire outsider with a Twitter account, a popular television series called The Apprentice, and a backbone made of reinforced steel who had no shot to win the GOP Primary, much less the general election in November of 2016.
Every lefty neuron from New York to San Francisco short-circuited after Trump was announced as the winner of the Electoral College. The first symptoms began to foam up to the surface revealing the emergence of the real pandemic of that first four year term – Trump Derangement Syndrome. Sure, one can see that the symptoms were there before the election with hindsight, but the madness that accompanies the toxic mental sickness that became TDS didn’t truly explode until he won. And ever since, it’s been spreading like wildfire through editorial boards, university faculty lounges, and Capitol Hill secret chambers where, apparently, the FBI has been hiding important little secrets.
The Media’s always been biased, but this was different. This wasn’t simply bias. It was an obsession. A cult-like meltdown. The political elites, especially on the Democratic Party side, and the mainstream media hacks, weren’t just disagreeing with Trump – they were foaming at the mouth.
It became a delusion wrapped in a hashtag. Leftists in the media, every morning, needed its hit of anti-Trump hysteria the same way a junkie needs a fix. They spewed their poison like a drunk vomiting into a toilet, spending four years in a codependent relationship with the word “impeachment.” Journalists transformed into full-time opposition researchers, turning their op-ed sections and political commentaries into The Resistance Weekly.
As Jesse Watters has since said, “It wasn’t reporting – it was group therapy for emotionally fragile liberals.”
Fast food in the White House? You’d think he had committed treason. When he walked in front of the Queen, CNN acted like it was the Fall of the British Empire. Two scoops of ice cream? Diet Cokes? A Sharpie map of a hurricane? Well then, that’s all they needed to prove that he was a Russian asset.
The witch hunt that they launched became one that would make Salem blush. And, the first lawfare attack became the Russia hoax – a distraction of defamation that, according to Mark Levin, “Wasn’t just a scandal – [it] was an attempted coup dressed in the garb of national security.”
For most of President Trump’s first term in the White House they screamed “collusion” louder than Paul Revere warned of the British. They claimed to have all kinds of evidence. Reports. The accounts of expert witnesses. In the end? Nothing. What it all was, to be honest, was a few angry bureaucrats and a bought and paid for bogus dossier funded by – you guessed it – Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, President Trump was busy renegotiating trade deals, rebuilding the military, delivering record-low unemployment and sending our economy into a positive direction not seen since Ronald Reagan.
The evidence that revealed Trump’s was a very successful presidency didn’t matter to the lefties. Donald J. Trump was not simply an outsider who had figured out a way to weasel his way into the political world – the leftwing establishment saw him as an existential threat to their power structure. They were ready to torch the Constitution itself if it meant stopping him.
Sean Hannity called it exactly right: “This was the deep state versus the outsider. The swamp versus the wrecking ball.” And when the swamp fights back, it fights dirty.
The problem for the Democrats is that the only policy they seemed to have was, “Orange Man Bad.” President Trump was keeping his promises, something not seen from politicians for decades – and the Democrats and their media henchmen didn’t care; they were too busy building a religion out of hating him. Trump Derangement Syndrome became the left’s only guiding principle. As Trump has quipped, he could cure cancer, and they’d accuse him of putting oncologists out of work.
As Jesse Watters put it, “If Trump walked on water, CNN would say it’s because he can’t swim.”
They became outraged about everything. His “mean” tweets, his handshakes, his harsh tone, his ties, the way he drank water. Every press conference was “an existential threat to democracy.” Every speech by Trump was “coded racism.” Every Supreme Court pick was the end of the Rule of Law and the potential “end of women’s rights.”
In 2020, Joseph Biden won a rigged election, and once Trump left office Trump Derangement Syndrome not only did not go away – it metastasized. They even impeached him after he was gone. Why? Because they were still terrified. They had to do whatever they could to make sure he never returned. They were terrified – not of the man – but of the movement.
They don’t truly fear Donald J. Trump because of what they claim in their false accusations. They don’t fear him because they believe him to be a tyrant. They fear him because he did something that nobody in recent memory had done before: Trump proved that you don’t have to be a part of the club to win an election and obtain the Office of the President of the United States of America.
Trump became the living, tweeting embodiment of every forgotten American who, when they turned their eyes toward Washington, felt lied to. He became the political representation of those people who simply want the American Dream – yet they are lied to by Washington, ignored by Wall Street, and mocked by Hollywood. And the establishment elites hated that. More than anything, that drives them mad.
It’s the whole nobility versus the peasants thing, but in modern America. The champion of average Americans had won the presidency and in doing so he shattered the myth that the elites were in control – and to the people who run Washington from their deep dark holes somewhere under the surface of the bubbling swamp, that is unforgivable.
Trump Derangement Syndrome was never about Trump. It’s about what he represents: You!
He didn’t create the rage. He exposed it.
Their madness is being fueled by our celebration of the fight for American values, and calling out the bureaucratic blob strangling liberty and setting fire to the United States Constitution. They never hated him. They hate the fact that he gave you a voice, and now they hate you even more because you are still using it. And now, during his second term as President of the United States, Donald J. Trump is cranking up the volume along with a vast majority of Americans and the leftwing commie progressive liberal swamp monsters are becoming desperate. They must stop Trump because what he represents is a movement that, if allowed to continue to burn, could torch everything they’ve been working toward ever since the ink dried on the original copy of the United States Constitution – a document that they hate not just because it is the blueprint for liberty and prosperity as we might see it – but because our Constitution is an obstacle to their schemes and plans to fundamentally transform America into something the Founding Fathers never intended.
