Derangement

The last week has been like one of those bizarre times in which you notice that nothing makes any sense, so you must be having a dream. With that realization, you awaken.

Except that for the last week, it has been no dream.

It started with the shootings at Brown University.

I have a special interest in that school. A dear friend, now 11 years dead, was a dean there, and I had a few opportunities to wander the campus. When students hunkered down in the library during the hours-long, still unexplained order that students remain where they were, I felt especially sorry for the kids in the library, one of the most hideous structures in the world. (The most hideous until the Obama structure in Illinois was announced.)

The shooter got away. At a news conference, Rhode Island (motto: “Suburb of Boston”) politicians, surrounded by studiedly diverse persons, announced how caring they are. Nothing was said about the shooter.

The next day they announced that they had a guy in custody. And they breathed a sigh of relief, in that the fellow was a Caucasian with a Nordic last name. Elsewhere, unmentioned in the government news conference, it was coming out that the shooter had yelled something before he opened fire. Authorities refused to say what it was. There has been a trend for people to shout a particular phrase before undertaking acts of deranged violence. But the oh-so-woke Rhode Island officials wouldn’t say what the fellow had shouted. (Maybe it was “Let’s go, Yankees” and it was thought insensitive to Red Sox fans, but I kind of doubt it.)

It turned out that the guy they’d picked up wasn’t the guy. His hasty detention was apparently arranged by publicity hound Kash Patel, the FBI director, who has made a habit of releasing incorrect information after highly publicized crimes. It may be a requirement of Trump Administration officials.

As of this writing, the authorities seem no closer to solving the Brown University shootings than they were a half hour after they happened. But they feel good about themselves and, after all, isn’t that what really matters?

It all was the stuff of a bad dream.

The following day it snowed here. The snow was light and fluffy and the slipperiest thing I’ve ever encountered. You couldn’t walk on it even while it only covered the topmost blades of grass. I was going to check the mail and realized it was impossible to walk on the stuff. In that there was very little accumulation, I decided to drive down my fairly steep driveway to the mailbox. After which I discovered that even with only this dusting the car wouldn’t make it back up the driveway. I found a safe and stable place in the driveway and parked, locked the car, and walked back up the driveway, carefully.

We got two or three more inches of snow overnight. Sunday morning I thought I’d go out and fetch the car and — it was gone! I was prepared to phone the sheriff to report it stolen, but I thought it would help to go to see if there were footprints or tracks that might be of use. Halfway down the driveway I saw the car, perpendicular to where I had left it, neatly parked in front of the retaining wall below the barn. If it had been three feet closer to the driveway I would have seen it; three feet in the other direction it would have been sticking out in the street. It was perfectly parked. The tires were still aligned fore and aft. It was covered in snow. There were no footprints or other tracks. It was still locked.

I got in and fired it up to let it get warm, and using a broom I cleared off the snow. Then I got in and easily drove it to its usual place at the top of the driveway. I still have no idea how it got moved. It couldn’t have slid there — the front wheels weren’t at an angle. Skidding there was impossible, but so was everything else. It really was like something from one of those dreams in which the inexplicable happens.

But my curiosity about that was secondary to the news from Australia that had come in overnight, where a deranged father-and-son madman team from what George W. Bush called “a religion of peace” had opened fire on a gathering of Jews engaged in Hanukkah observance. Whether or what they may have shouted (“Let’s go, Bludgers”?) went unreported. The behavior of the Australian police was shameful. They’re eligible for jobs in Providence. The Australian government was even worse, though that’s to be expected in that former penal colony.

Finally, an Islamic man actually tackled one of the shooters, himself getting shot twice in the process.

Which itself got pushed away by the news from Los Angeles. Through an unusual set of events I was able to send a note to a friend about the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner before there was official word that anyone had died at their home. As the night unfolded, every disclosure made the story worse.

Always eager to break wind in the elevator if it will get him attention, Donald Trump commented on the murders Monday morning. He may as well have announced, “As you may have noticed, I have no soul.” Of course, most of us have noticed. He flat-out announced that Heaven is not for him, in August (setting off bulletin alarms in newsrooms around the world, because for the first time there was now suspicion that he had told the truth, though it never jelled into a trend).

Trump said, basically, that the Reiners had deserved to die, because they did not like Trump. Later in the day, he confirmed to reporters that what he had written represented his opinion. His remarks were so reprehensible that the usually measured Jim Geraghty wrote in the conservative National Review, in an article entitled “Trump’s Appalling Reiner Reaction Is a Sign of Something Deeply Wrong,” that “The president of the United States is a hateful raging lunatic with all the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer.” (He later corrected this, saying that Dahmer, a Milwaukee lad who enjoyed the unfortunate hobby of killing and eating young men, did ultimately express remorse, something Trump would never do.)

It was too much for some regular Trump supporters, who have survived on the phrase, “C’mon, the other choice was Kamila Harris,” and they have a point. But they are not deranged, and Trump’s comments were beyond their boundary of approval.

Trump wrote in his miserable Reiner tweet about “Trump Derangement Syndrome” without knowing the phrase’s meaning: Suffering symptoms of being Donald Trump, or being a person enthusiastic in support of Trump and his thoughts and actions, angrily insisting that poop is chocolate ice cream if Trump says so. They are a small and decreasing minority. (This group does not include many of the Trumpian sycophants in Congress. Those are called “cowards.”)

A pretty remarkable — and deranged — few days. But it wasn’t over yet.

Tuesday morning we awakened to the surprising news that the widely loved Susie Wiles (White House chief of staff and sane people’s hope that the president, whose personality is that of a cranky, spoiled toddler but who has control of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, might be reined in when it’s really important) had been interviewed by Vanity Fair magazine, a publication deserving of its title. In the interview, she confirmed most everyone’s suspicions. Proudly. Yeah, the boss is crazy. Yeah, the vice president is a kook and total political opportunist. Yeah, many in the White House knew that the tariffs would turn out to be the disaster they are. And so on.

That article drew considerable attention, as one would have imagined. CNN covered it continuously and, typically, poorly. Fox Trump Channel mostly found something else to talk about. It had been a difficult couple of days for a channel devoted to the unquestioning worship of a man who is demonstrably, probably criminally, insane.

Surely we were done now and it was possible to awaken from this fever dream, right? Don’t bet on it. On Tuesday night Trump issued another of his ravings, the angry preschooler this time announcing a blockade on Venezuela — an arguable act of war — and demanding that Venezuela return money, land, and oil belonging to the United States. Thing is, the United States never owned any land or oil in Venezuela, or is owed any money by it. Venezuela years ago seized land and oil reserves from some American companies. It is a Trumpian habit to indulge in his tough guy fantasies by pretending to be a mob thumb-breaker who’ll do collections in exchange for a cut of the take. Fewer people were listening now: with his Monday tweet, it became undeniably clear to anyone except those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome that the president is entirely reality-disabled.

He added to it all Wednesday by unveiling a kind of hall of presidents in the White House, with Trump’s deranged commentary beneath each. Really.

Tuesday night he announced that he would be making a nationally televised screech at the people, Wednesday night. There was much speculation. Would he announce that bombing of Venezuela was underway? That Susie Wiles had accidentally fallen from a window in a tall building? Perhaps he would elaborate upon his memories of Rob Reiner.

As with certifiable loons in general, Trump is not predictable. Maybe he would just hold forth on his favorite subject and simply reassure the country that he still holds himself in extremely high esteem, which he had checked and confirmed is entirely deserved — “everybody says it, I can tell you that.”

It turned out to be the last of the above choices.

And what a deranged screech it was! During the campaign it was Trump bagging French fries at McDonalds. The angry, shouted remarks Wednesday night featured Trump with his hand pulling the chocolate ice cream machine into overdrive. Much of what he said was untrue. Where he did start with a grain of truth, he quickly exaggerated it into falsehood.

(Hint: The U.S. Inflation rate in December 2024, Biden’s last full month in office, was 2.9 percent. The last reported U.S. inflation rate during the Trump administration was 3.0 percent, in September of this year. September 2024, to compare apples to apples, was 2.4 percent. So month over month, Trump raised inflation by six-tenths of a percent. When he says otherwise, he is lying. The unemployment rate under Trump is up. We weren’t a “dead” nation when he took office, and we’re not a “hot” nation now.)

And that takes us only through Wednesday. An utterly deranged five days.

As Trump would put it is were he to break with tradition and tell the truth, “There has never been anything like it.”

As with Trump Derangement Syndrome, to paraphrase one the characters in a Rob Reiner film, he keeps saying nobody has seen anything like it, but I don’t think it means what he thinks it means.