One of the more interesting social phenomena in recent member involves a new mental disease affecting a significant percentage of the U.S. population. This mental-psychological contagion found its birth on June 16, 2015.
What happened on June 16, 2015?
That was the date Donald Trump, the New York Real Estate tycoon and star of the popular television reality show, The Apprentice, announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election. Prior to June 16, 2015, Donald Trump was a mostly admired and respected businessman who possessed a brash, in-your-face persona. But other than a small number of individual businesspeople who resented him for one reason or another, most people, including Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Whoopie Goldberg, Regis Philbin, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Al Sharpton, Russell Simmons, Mark Cuban, Piers Morgan, Larry King, Mike Tyson, Tom Brady, Gene Simmons, Arsenio Hall, Joan Rivers, and many, many others, held Mr. Trump in high esteem.
Yet somehow, the moment Donald Trump announced he would be running for president on the Republican ticket, and that he would put an end to illegal immigration, every single person on the Left, without exception (and even some supposed thought-leaders on the Right) lost their collective minds with a simultaneity that is staggering. All of a sudden, the man whom they once respected, admired, and looked up to had become, in an instant, Adolf Hitler incarnate, a Nazi, and a few even thought of Trump as Satan himself (although many on the Left felt that was an unfair smear on Satan).
The federal government (led by then-President Barack Obama along with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) launched a conspiracy – the Russia-Collusion Hoax – to try to destroy him. Once Trump was in office, he was subject to impeachment proceedings by the Democrats – twice. When he prepared to run for office again, the Deep State colluded with both the Mainstream Media and Social Media to try to destroy him. The corrupt Biden FBI raided his Mar Lago home. He was subject to a variety of lawsuits, some of which resulted in his being convicted of numerous felonies – all of them bogus. And even to this day, activist judges routinely exceed their authority to block President Trump’s policies to Make America Great Again.
People on media outlets such as NPR, PBS, Slate, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, The Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and occasionally even the Wall Street Journal, and countless other outlets all band together to try to spread falsehoods under the guise of talking points to try to undermine this one individual.
Thus, I sometimes notice that certain people in the media who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, when writing about things that have nothing whatsoever to do with Donald Trump, simply cannot resist the need to insert a completely irrelevant quip that is derogatory of the sitting President. It’s almost as if the Left has this unspoken understanding that in order to display their Left-Wing credentials, in order to present their proof of legitimacy, they must include some snide remark about Donald Trump to legitimize their Left-Wing bona fides and prove they are part of the “I Hate Trump” club.
Thus it was that I read an otherwise well-written piece authored by Maureen Dowd, a staple of the Leftist media. Ms. Dowd’s piece was sent to me by the inimitable Godfrey Harris, a tough-minded juggernaut of unspeakable energy and drive, who has run a public policy interest out of Los Angeles for over 50 years. I have been involved with Godfrey over the years in producing some of his many books he has authored, in speaking engagements which he has delivered masterfully, and other matters. Godfrey remains both a friend and mentor to me, and has thrown numerous ideas my way over the years. Thus, it was unsurprising that Godfrey would reach out and send me this New York Times opinion piece by Ms. Dowd.
Titled “Books are Sexy!” (something I myself had never considered in spite of my love of books) and published on August 2, 2025, she begins her piece by making a rather curious if not provocative statement involving eroticism: “It was one of the most erotic things I have ever heard.”
Was she referencing a chapter from 50 Shades of Grey? No. She went on: “A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer.” That, to Ms. Dowd, was a steamy, titillating thought. While I had trouble tracking with her brand of arousal, I thought to myself, “To each her own.” Lust is a very interesting phenomenon, but I think there is one thing Ms. Dowd simply cannot resist and must succumb to, even more than the thought of a man reading Jane Austen, and that is the hatred of Donald Trump.
Thus, while odd, it was not at all surprising that after reading Ms. Dowd’s lament that people (i.e., men) are not reading enough these days, especially not enough fiction, and especially not enough novels, she somehow allowed her pastiche of thought to turn to The Donald.
She did so by, out of nowhere, hitting us upside the head with this:
Mike Nichols once turned to me at a dinner in L.A. and told me his favorite novel was Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” I was startled because I have read that book over and over, finding it a great portrait of a phenomenon that is common in politics. Someone makes a wrong move and is unable to recover, slipping into a shame spiral. (This does not apply to Donald Trump.)
Huh? Does it apply to Barack Obama? To Howard Stern? To Nancy Pelosi? What does any of this have to do with Donald Trump?
She continues, pretending we won’t notice she has Donald Trump trapped inside her mind. Five paragraphs later, she returns to her obsession with the President:
President Trump projects a crude, bombastic image of masculinity. I can always escape by rereading Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend,” and falling back in love with Eugene Wrayburn, an indolent, upper-crust barrister who turns out to have every quality a man should have.
Well, after all, this is an opinion piece, so she is certainly permitted to interject random, stream-of-consciousness quips displaying her disdain for Trump. Could it be within the realm of possibility for her, a woman of the Left, to say something praiseworthy of The Donald? I think she’d rather drink hemlock.
If I were to ask her if Trump’s decision to set back Iran’s nuclear desires to immolate every Jew in Israel was a good move, I’m certain she would pour cold water on that question.
How about Trump’s ability to seal the border and bring illegal immigration down to a bare trickle? She would shriek in horror.
What about Trump taking out various radicalized Islamic terrorists who would relish the thought of torturing, raping, and burning alive Maureen Dowd herself – people such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Qasem Soleimani, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Jamal al-Badawi, Hamza Bin Laden, or Qassim al-Rimi? She wouldn’t blink as she responded that Trump is a murdering psychopathic child rapist, losing the ability to also say that the aforementioned are psychopathic monsters who are responsible for the death of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.
What might she say about Trump’s economic policies, including the recent deals of persuading various nation-states to invest billions into the U.S. economy? Her response would be as if she never heard the question.
Trump Derangement Syndrome appears to release acids into the soul and brain of its victims. Their overarching worldview is one of seething hatred towards one man who has demonstrated, whatever his personal flaws, he is bent on removing policies that hurt America and replacing them with policies that strengthen America.
Maureen Dowd wrote a nice contribution outlining the value of reading fiction rather than only non-fiction. Her article is well-written and sensible. She is smart, witty, and learned. Yet she could not curtail her anti-Trump impulse to smear the President of the United States in an article that has virtually nothing to do with him, a man she has nothing but unbridled contempt for. All that the sophists and intellectuals and coastal elites can come up with is that Trump is a crude and unseemly and revolting example of masculinity. And not much more.
And that, my friends, is the latest elephant in the room.
