Truesee's Daily Wonder

Opinion

Megan McArdle

The Washington Post

February 10, 2025

During the first Trump administration, his supporters claimed to have identified a new psychiatric malady: “Trump derangement syndrome.” This condition primarily infected progressives in mainstream institutions such as media and academia. It caused an abrupt loss of perspective any time the subject of Donald Trump came up.

Liberals saw this alleged syndrome as an appropriate reaction to a uniquely lawless president. But Trump’s supporters were not wrong that some people’s visceral horror led them to repeatedly overreact — Russiagate, for example. This was not only unhealthy for the country but also made it harder to push back on Trump’s worst ideas, as liberals became the boy who cried wolf. So, this time, the task for Trump’s opponents is to keep their heads and calmly highlight the downsides of his policies, rather than issuing nonstop warnings that the dark night of fascism is descending on America.

The task for Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, is not to develop their own variant of Trump derangement syndrome.

For example, when Trump imposed tariffs on Canada, he claimed they were needed to halt the flows of fentanyl and illegal immigrants across our northern border. This seemed obviously a pretext to justify tariffs that he’s been promising for years, not because of security concerns, but because he thinks they’re good for the economy.

As pretexts go, this one is pretty thin. In fiscal 2024, Customs and Border Protection caught 23,721 people trying to illegally cross from Canada into the United States, just 1.5 percent of total apprehensions — and for comparison, in 2023, more than 30,000 undocumented migrants crossed in the other direction. Similarly, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized 43 pounds of fentanyl coming across our northern border, compared to 21,148 pounds coming from Mexico. Canada is simply not a significant contributor to our fentanyl problem.

Nonetheless, once Trump said it, the right wing on X became very, very invested in the idea that Canadian fentanyl was a major problem that needed a drastic solution. Suggest that tariffs were a solution in search of a problem, and you’d be mobbed by people who were sincerely outraged by an issue they’d never heard of three days ago. Similarly, the minute Elon Musk went after the U.S. Agency for International Development, right-wing commentators became convinced the agency was a left-wing boondoggle that needed to be shut down. Conspiracy theorists suggested the agency was subsidizing media outlets such as Politico. (Spoiler alert: They were paying for subscriptions.) Even more bizarrely, they decided that conservative agitator Chris Rufo was on the “USAID gravy train.” I have no doubt that USAID has funded many left-wing programs and made efforts to push progressive cultural values in other countries. But it also funds things that aren’t particularly controversial, such as fighting AIDS and malaria, and providing earthquake relief. Perhaps it is not very good at those jobs, but the insta-USAID experts were not making a sophisticated argument about program design and implementation.

“By going after USAID the very first week,” said Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, “the White House has done what they say to do in prison: find the biggest, baddest meanest guy on your cell block, and sock him square in the jaw on Day 1.” “I’d estimate that over half of the DC economy is an outright looting of all of us, via USAID grants,” opined conservative influencer Mike Cernovich. The reason to mount a frontal attack on USAID is not because it has a major impact on U.S. politics and policy, but rather because it doesn’t. The domestic constituency for foreign aid programs is small and cutting them is much more popular than reducing domestic or defense spending. Picking on this agency isn’t like going after the biggest guy in the prison yard; it’s like wandering into the prison infirmary and beating up the sickest inmate you can find.

The Trump administration is hardly the first administration to try to score easy political wins by going after politically vulnerable programs. Nor is Trump the first president to manufacture legal pretexts for something he wanted to do for other reasons. (Witness the Biden administration’s attempt to forgive student loans as a pandemic emergency measure.) And you can’t blame the members of Trump’s administration for going along with the ruse, since supporting the boss’s policies is part of the job description. But the rest of us are operating under no such constraint, and it is beneath our dignity to lose our minds every time Trump opens his mouth. Like many politicians, Trump has a lot of bad ideas and defends them by saying things that aren’t true. It is bad for us, and the country, when we dive down the rabbit hole after him.