loading . . . Trump Derangement Syndrome Is a Self-Destructive Distraction In recent weeks, Trumpian excesses have—finally—provoked some visible setbacks: These include his firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; the scaling back of the grandiose “regime-change” goal of his Iran war; and the grudging acquiescence, at least purported, in repeated judicial rejections of unlawful planks of his policy and political agendas.
This is all good news, but let’s remember: These retreats are merely tactical. Neither Trump nor his sycophants in the executive branch and Congress have put aside their grander vision of marginalizing entrenched liberal values; dismantling private and public bastions of liberal political power, cultural authority, and societal stature; and hollowing out or outright scrapping the Constitution itself.
Liberals must not merely keep their guard up. They must ratchet up their pushback game. Too often, this has been an erratic, flick-of-the-wrist affair, which has enabled their insurrectionist adversaries to push forward with their stated goals.
Readers of this journal are already familiar with some of the most essential resets. As Michael Tomasky elaborated in the March 2026 edition of _The New Republic,_ their progressive and centrist factions need to transcend their preoccupation with intra-family spats over messaging and programmatic agendas and mobilize more robustly against the New Right’s genuinely existential war against common, foundational liberal _values and goals_. As I have repeatedly urged, liberal politicians, pundits, and advocates must wrap themselves in the Constitution—not just as a throwaway talking point, but to spell out how and why the principles and provisions on MAGA’s chopping block serve interests vital to both constitutional democracy and real-life individuals and families.
To these ends, attention must be paid to an ingrained miscue that underlies these and other fault lines, but has gained less notice: liberals’ obsession with Trump as an individual scoundrel—what their adversaries snark as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” To be sure, liberals’ reasons for demonizing Trump are hardly off base. On the contrary, close to 100 percent of the time they are 100 percent correct. The problem is that, with notable exceptions, liberals at all levels share Gavin Newsom’s recent reassuring brush-off that MAGA is just a “temporary” hiccup, a “cult of personality,” an “invasive species [that] will not survive Donald Trump.” They think their problem is solely Trump and his putatively ephemeral popular appeal.
This is not the case. Behind this erratic but charismatic leader stands an expressly antidemocratic _movement_ with support from substantial and committed constituencies. They may represent a distinct minority of the electorate, but this antidemocratic cabal is driven by deeply rooted economic, cultural, and technological trends, and their message is scripted by a robust cadre of well-versed, savvy, and politically connected savants. Many of the latter view Trump as a useful buffoon, not a visionary leader—very much as the Nazis viewed Germany’s President Paul Von Hindenberg when he appointed Hitler chancellor in 1932. None of these grievants will quit the current battlefield, when and if Trump sulks off.
As the New Right movement has taken shape and accumulated power, liberals have remained steadfastly unaware of the radical—indeed, truly counterrevolutionary—depth of their adversaries’ spurn for the Constitution, and of the Enlightenment values that the Constitution codifies: individual liberty, pluralistic tolerance, and representative democratic governance. Liberals tend to harbor derogatory caricatures that devalue the constituencies open to that agenda, shrug off their motivations for shedding pro-liberal and Democratic loyalty, and discount their political weight. Most disabling, the overwhelming majority of liberals are downright ignorant of the academic, religious, and think-tank philosophies that energize and give direction to this movement, to say nothing of the ideas and proposals they elaborate.
A major reason that liberals are unaware of these New Right intellectuals is that their ideas and protagonists were, until quite recently, safely beyond the fringe. Their surge to the mainstream—by many measures, dominance—of conservatism and the Republican Party was sparked by a 2018 tract, _Why Liberalism Failed_ , written by Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen. Deneen derides liberalism as fatally riven by fundamental contradictions: “A massive state architecture and a globalized economy … combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures [supposed to beget individual] freedom.” Deneen’s message caught the eye of one eminent liberal, Barack Obama. Obama included it in his 2018 reading list, posting on Facebook,__ “I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril.”
In 2019, Deneen’s critique was sharpened by an Israeli American publicist, Oram Hazony. “Deneen and Hazony,” Brookings scholar William Galston wrote, “have mounted a frontal attack on the entire individualist, rights-based liberal tradition that they trace back to John Locke.” So far, such warnings have gone almost universally unheeded.
By 2022, Deneen, Hazony, and other New Right protagonists had embraced overtly theocratic, authoritarian agendas as means necessary to displace liberal domination of ideology, politics, education, and culture. Hazony wrote that year, “The only thing that is strong enough to stop the religion of woke neo-Marxism is the religion of biblical Christianity. This was a Christian nation, historically and according to its laws, and it’s going to be a Christian nation again.”
In 2019, Hazony had created the Burke Foundation, which holds annual “National Conservatism Conferences.” To run the foundation and its conferences, Hazony tapped Christopher DeMuth, who after serving for two decades as the CEO of the mainstream conservative American Enterprise Institute, became affiliated with the militantly New Right Claremont Institute.
Among other initiatives, Claremont commissioned a “79 Days Report” prior to the 2020 election, which was effectively a playbook for overturning a feared Trump loss to Biden. Written by the subsequently disbarred attorney John Eastman, the report guided the thinking of the postelection Stop the Steal campaign. All four “Natcon” conferences have been heavily attended by activists, academics, think tankers, and politicians, including representatives of European far-right parties and factions. In a 2019 Claremont publication, DeMuth acknowledged that the U.S. New Right’s ethnonationalist “spirit of nationhood” was inspired by the “neo-nationalist parties of Germany and France” and counterparts in other European countries.
Last but not least on this (abbreviated) list is Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule. Vermeule has been labeled the New Right “movement’s high priest,” by Laura Field, in her encyclopedic and widely acclaimed 2025 volume, _Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA Right._ With disarming candor, Vermeule “put[s] little stock or hope or faith in law.” He prefers “a Christian Strategy … which view[s] political commitments [a.k.a. ‘laws’] … as tactical tools to be handled in whatever way best serves the cause of Christ.… [The] true identity of liberalism is aligned with Satan.” With University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, Vermeule co-authored a 2011 book titled _The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic,_ which argued that “the legally constrained executive is now a historical curiosity” and the “Madisonian separation of powers is obsolete.”
However exotic, these views cannot be dismissed as inconsequential. Quite the contrary. As Field notes, at Natcon 4, in July 2024, six U.S. senators were listed as speakers; Josh Hawley of Missouri and Vice President JD Vance gave keynotes. Within two months of taking office, the second Trump administration had hired over 30 alumni of Claremont Institute fellowship programs. By far the most fervent political disciple of these New Right ideologues is Vance. As _New York Times_ columnist Thomas Edsall recently elaborated, Deneen and Vermeule “heavily influence Vance’s thinking.” That influence is evident in Vance’s self-description as “a voice [of the] postliberal right” with a “corrective” mission that in his view licenses serial deployment of patent falsehoods to displace liberals or Democrats, with whom “there is no unity,” since they are “terrorist sympathizers [who] celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination”—thus knowingly propagating myths to galvanize his followers.
Behind Vance and numerous other far-right agents and causes stands the fortune of PayPal and Palantir billionaire Peter Thiel. Infamously, Thiel has written that he does not “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” in part because of the Nineteenth Amendment’s “extension of the franchise to women” over a century ago.
Democratic politicians, including former Vice President Al Gore, have been admonished, even within their own ranks, for tossing about assertions that Trump is a “Hitler” or “Nazi” facsimile. But if such critics would dig deeper into the forces behind Trump, they could validate, indeed emblazon, that charge. Today’s New Right savants have admiringly exhumed Hitler’s favorite philosophical guru, Carl Schmitt. Thus, it seems hardly coincidental that key Schmittian concepts structure Trump’s modus operandi: that the leader of the executive branch is the national “sovereign”—not, as the Constitution proclaims, “We the People”; that law is nothing but an illegitimate obstacle to fulfillment of the sovereign leader’s will; that democratic governance is inevitably, and appropriately, grounded in dividing “the People” and their “friends,” from their “enemies,” and flattering and where necessary rewarding the former, while pursuing “retribution” against the latter; and that the leader embodies the Will of the People, regardless of whatever policy or rhetorical flip-flops he or she may find expedient.
Recently, two distinguished experts in Nazi-era history, American Timothy Ryback and German Victor Ullrich, have detailed Hitler’s maneuvers in the 1920s and early 1930s, and, most of all, his adversaries’ blinkered indifference and miscalculations, without which his seizure of untrammeled power could have been blocked. Both authors expressly highlight parallels between that history and current challenges facing constitutional democracies in the U.S. and across the West, thereby to warn contemporary democratic, rule of law–embracing readers—and leaders—not to repeat that century-old catastrophic cycle. Yes, Trump might be distinctly deranging. But we must keep the parade of horribles that follow in his wake in view if we are to survive them. https://newrepublic.com/article/207861/dangerous-distraction-trump-derangement-syndrome
