In a rare admission, a New York Times liberal named Michelle Goldberg acknowledged in a new column that she’s suffering from an all-too-common malady: Trump Derangement Syndrome. Okay, Goldberg does not, of course, actually put it in those terms, but if you admit in a national newspaper that you’ve suffered a decline in your personal health attributed specifically to the election of a Republican president, what else can anyone conclude? That’s exactly what Goldberg did in her review of Stanley Greenberg’s new book, where the pollster predicts that a blue wave will knock Trump out of the White House in 2020.
“Toward the end of his new book, ‘R.I.P. G.O.P.,’ the renowned Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg makes a thrilling prediction, delivered with the certainty of prophecy,” Goldberg tells her readers. “It sounds almost messianic: the Republican Party, that foul agglomeration of bigotry and avarice that has turned American politics into a dystopian farce, not just defeated but destroyed.”
But Goldberg warned her audience not to get too confident.
“This is not the first time that experts have predicted the inevitable triumph of progressive politics. Seventeen years ago, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published ‘The Emerging Democratic Majority,’ which argued that the country was on the cusp of a liberal political realignment driven by growing diversity, urbanization and gender equality,” she writes.
That realignment didn’t happen, of course, but Goldberg is hopeful that THIS time, all her dreams of GOP death will come true.
Alas: “His confidence will not be enough to lessen the insomnia that has plagued me since the cursed night when Trump was elected. But his book should be a corrective to the media’s overweening focus on the mulish devotion of Trump voters. Trump hatred is a much more potent force in this country than Trump love.”
When people come to these advanced stages of TDS, it’s almost impossible to do anything other than pity them. It’s hard to imagine that we would even lose a wink of sleep if Bernie Sanders were to be elected, and that would spell almost certain doom for the economy. But it’s like, what are you going to do? Anything? No, almost certainly not. And whomever the president is and however disturbing their ideas might be, Washington politics are never going to override our God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s actually sad that anyone would let them.
But, when it comes to liberals like Goldberg who put all their faith in the government, it’s hardly surprising.