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Donald Trump has done the seemingly impossible: Despite the most outrageous, embarrassing, conspicuously dangerous — even life-threatening — actions, he continues to enjoy the complete trust of a significant share of Americans, who apparently have no need for proof that anything he claims is true. 

In fact, almost all that he says, or does, or fails to do after saying he will — is perfectly acceptable to his base.  

The list of examples is long. Despite some uneasy distrust of the Trump administration over the “Epstein files,” plenty of Republicans say they’re satisfied with his handling of the matter. 

Tariffs come and tariffs go, earning the president a new media acronym — TACO, for Trump Always Chickens Out — but for the MAGA core it’s just proof that he’s some kind of unfathomable genius at negotiation.

Trump brings in “brilliant” people — then dismisses these same, now “bad” or “stupid,” people. And it’s all fine with his lock-step followers.  

The rest of us, puzzled by this anything-goes-with-Trump attitude, spend too little time figuring out what to do about it. Which, one hopes, is not… nothing. 

Here are some possible explanations for the real TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) among his unshakably faithful acolytes. The actual causes are, of course, more complex, but the contributing factors no doubt include some mix of the following:

• An unwillingness to question their own choices; an aversion to the pain of buyer’s remorse.
• Short attention spans and memories, severely impairing critical thinking.
• Inadequate levels of education or knowledge of the world (outside their physical and digital communities), and empathy for the suffering of others.
• Knee-jerk distrust of “liberal media” or anyone suspiciously “liberal.”
• Getting their information exclusively from “news sources” that cloak almost every Trump-spawned deed, plan, or thought, in words of praise.
• A deep-seated need for a messiah with simple answers to complex problems.
• A love affair with the performative, endlessly entertaining aspects of Trump, whose “theater of chaos” melds nicely into lives mediated by Candy Crush and TikTok.

A Bit of Good News

While we’re waiting — and waiting — for a suitably muscular response to Trump, we can at least take solace in rumblings of discontent, from any quarters. 

This includes a subset of Republicans in Congress, who are increasingly breaking ranks over a host of issues. One is pushback against Trump’s proposal that tariff fees fund “rebates” to Americans (read electoral “bribes”), rather than going toward what other Senate Republicans want to see — efforts to reduce America’s staggering debt, which Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill promises to increase by trillions of dollars. 

More consequential — and what should be getting enormous media coverage — is the Democrats’ proposed pushback against Trump’s demand that Texas and other red states create more Republican House seats by goosing their existing gerrymandering of election districts. The aim of this mockery of fairness in electoral maps is to make sure a narrowly divided US House stays under GOP control after the 2026 midterm elections. 

A growing list of Democratic states, including New York, California, and Illinois, are saying, Well, fine, two can play that game. But how many blue seats might be generated by similar partisan manipulations? Enough to counterbalance the proposed red wave? For complex geographic/demographic reasons, probably not.

And this is just one of many schemes Trump’s GOP is cooking up — wherever they have control of, or influence over, the electoral process — to ensure that Trump remains effectively unopposed throughout his whole four-year term, and perhaps beyond. 

Democracy dies in plain sight, on the altar of one man’s quest for absolute power and his cynical party’s willingness, even eagerness, to ride along. 

Strange and Unpredictable Times

By now, pretty much everyone understands Trump’s core game: By distracting the public from scandals and bad news with a nonstop circus of White House pronouncements, actions, and policy flip-flops, he maintains the upper hand and keeps opponents in defensive mode.

Yet much less is known about the actual daily operation of government during the Trumpocene. Revelations trickle out, often long after events — much like how we learn anything about the inner workings of Putin’s regime in the Kremlin or Xi’s in Beijing. 

Still, some news of the infighting, reversals, and chaos that define the present administration has come out, though little of it gets critical attention. Here’s just one example: the ouster of top vaccine regulator Vinay Prasad. I’d guess many people reading this column haven’t heard about it. Given how important vaccines are to the public’s wellbeing, the fact that his departure registers as little more than a blip on the media’s news-feeds seems worth considering. 

Perhaps we can ascribe this “failure to communicate” to the heavy load the media is now carrying. Simply too many fires to cover. 

Cumulatively, however, the perpetual convulsions of Trump’s Washington is the story. 

Team Trump has in fact followed the “flood the zone” tactic, first articulated by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. But is there a method behind the president’s maddeningly scattershot aggressions? There is. The targets of the seeming chaos are precisely those pillars of democracy he knows he must weaken or destroy in his march to authoritarian rule.

At or near the top of Trump’s institutional enemies list are the courts, especially the federal courts. It should come as no surprise that Trump has dramatically come into conflict with judges throughout the country and across the political spectrum, a fair number of them his own appointees. Because, in taking on the judges — who have so far handed him a long and growing string of judicial defeats —Trump is targeting the clearest manifestation our country has of the rule of law. Thereby demonstrating, over and over again, his contempt for all such constraints. And for the US Constitution.

It  should also come as no surprise that Trump is looking for ways to escalate this confrontation with what is now regarded as perhaps the only institution possessing the capacity to rein in his quest for absolute power.

A recent example of such escalation is the attack by Trump’s weaponized Department of Justice on one of the sharper judicial thorns in the president’s side: the highly respected chief judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, James E. “Jeb” Boasberg. 

As with most Trumpian sallies, the specifics of the DOJ’s ethics complaint against Boasberg don’t pass the laugh test. Boasberg’s real “offense” was being the first federal judge to say a hard No to Trump in the matter of deporting immigrants to El Salvador with no semblance of due process — a line in the sand that seemed to buck up Boasberg’s quailing judicial colleagues in the plethora of cases that have followed. 

Let’s further note that, when it comes to harassment of judges who have defended the rule of law against Trump’s assaults, Boasberg hardly stands alone.

And, while Trump and his enablers are busy arresting or trying to intimidate judges he doesn’t like, he’s also putting on the bench some eminently unqualified toadies, such as his personal defense attorney, Emil Bove III, with the near-unanimous approval of his wholly-owned party — documented malfeasances be damned.

If a journalist visiting from Mars looked at nothing else but the Boasberg and Bove affairs, they’d come away with a clear X-ray of the malignant Trump tumor doing its deadly work on the US body politic.

Another storyline that seems to get lost is how Trump, when forced to face reality, winds up governing more like the Joe Biden he still vilifies — restoring some funding, TACOing some tariffs, backing away on a host of issues from Ukraine to Gaza — while continuing to pursue other highly reckless and damaging courses of action. 

At the same time, the bloodletting and evidence-free witch hunts continue. A recent example is the Justice Department’s investigation of faculty at right-leaning George Mason University for having the nerve to pass a resolution supporting the university’s president, the first Black president of Virginia’s largest public research university. His crime? Seeking to broaden faculty diversity. 

Oh, the temerity! Into the stockade with him!

Then there is the Lyme disease vaccine researcher, in the US since age five and with a green card, held for days at San Francisco International Airport upon returning from his brother’s wedding abroad, while not being permitted access to an attorney. 

This would be alarming enough if it were any person in his position. But the fact that the administration is targeting some of our country’s most valuable individuals — like a scientist working toward the elimination of a debilitating, sometimes deadly disease — is truly troubling. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s distract-a-rama continues with his daily tilts at windmills — recently, literal windmills. For comic relief, watch this sublime video, where child avatars stand in for Trump, mouthing (word for word) his crazy rant against wind power, and for the silent, befuddled EU president on the receiving end.