TRUMP Derangement Syndrome is alive and kicking in, of all places, The Spectator. In case you need reminding, The Spectator – the oldest surviving magazine in the world – is ‘a politically conservative British political and cultural weekly news magazine’ as described by Wikipedia.
It is of course not necessary that a magazine publishes only pieces that reflect the political inclination of its editors and owners, as that would make for a monotonous diet. Magazines, good ones at least, promote intelligent debate, and that includes giving detractors a chance to engage in the competitive marketplace of ideas. While The Spectator’s editorial line is right of centre, examples of left-wing or left-leaning perspectives do appear, particularly in areas such as arts, culture, identity politics and foreign affairs.
Thus a magazine that regularly published Roger Scruton, the towering figure of British conservatism, also gave column inches to David Renton, a former member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and a founding member of revolutionary socialism in the 21st century, and the late David Marquand, previously a Labour MP and member of the Social Democratic Party.
The presence of such voices is often defended by The Spectator as evidence of its commitment to a ‘broad church’ of opinion. However, it also demonstrates that the magazine has drifted, in part, toward the same elite consensus it once challenged. The key distinction is no longer between left and right, but between populist realism and elite cosmopolitanism – on which both left and right in The Spectator agree when the subject is Donald Trump.
With two egregious recent articles – Sam Leith’s Will Donald Trump’s defenders finally admit the truth? and David Hare’s Satire is nothing without contempt– the Michael Gove-edited magazine has fallen into rather embarrassing lows. Both pieces read more like moralist screeching from the Guardian than thoughtful contributions to Britain’s premier conservative weekly. They suffer from the same affliction: a chronic condition of the London and US chattering classes that causes its sufferers to lose all proportionality, reason and capacity for self-reflection when discussing Donald J Trump.
Sam Leith’s Trump-as-tyrant fantasy
So just what is TDS? The late political columnist and conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer said in 2017: ‘What distinguishes Trump Derangement Syndrome is not just general hysteria about the subject, but additionally the inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences on the one hand and signs of psychic pathology on the other.’ Journalist Fareed Zakaria defined TDS more pithily as ‘hatred of President Trump so intense that it impairs people’s judgment’.
Zakaria could have used Sam Leith, whose core thesis is that Trump is a fascist tyrant who seeks to destroy the US Constitution and crown himself king, as a textbook example. Leith wastes no time to launch into his fully impaired judgment. His first paragraph:
‘So, there we have it. The President of the United States wants to bypass state governors and deploy the National Guard and the US Marine Corps against his own citizens. This comes after Donald Trump’s administration, apparently impatient with the existing legal immigration process, started bundling black and brown people into vans with a view to summary deportation.’
A reader with a modicum of respect for facts would ask firstly how the President ‘bypassed’ state governors, and then how deploying the National Guard and the US Marine Corps constitutes an action ‘against his own citizens’. There is no explanation as to how the US President seeking to deport illegal immigrants from a state whose Governor ordered the police department and sheriff’s office to shield criminal illegal aliens from removal by Federal authorities such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is ‘bypassing’ state governors or acting against the interest of US citizens. Overall, 54 per cent of US adults approve of deportation of illegal immigrants (not just apprehension and incarceration) compared with 46 per cent who disapprove of it, according to a recent CBS News/YouGov survey.
According to Leith, President Trump is impatient with existing legal immigration processes. No word on the outcome of the previous administration’s record which allowed an estimated 12million illegal immigrants into the country. But when Senator Joe Biden was asked in 2007 if he would allow ‘sanctuary cities’ to exist if he were President, his answer was ‘no’. He said that sanctuary cities turn into ‘dumps’ and the only reason they exist is ‘because the Federal government doesn’t enforce the law’.
Leith opines that ‘if you believe in some version of democracy or the rule of law – rather than the absolute personal power of a tyrant – Trump and Trumpism are your enemy.’ Leith seems to be in step with the view expressed by Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota (another sanctuary state) and Kamala Harris’s running mate as Vice President in the 2024 election that ‘ICE agents under the orders of President Trump are a modern-day Gestapo’. Leith’s version of the rule of law is apparently consistent with allowing 12million illegal immigrants to remain protected within sanctuary states. California Governor Gavin Newsom even signed a Bill into law in 2024 that bars local government from requiring residents to show a valid form of identification to vote in the state.
Leith’s article doesn’t bother with legal facts: no mention that illegal immigration, by its very nature, involves breaching federal law; no reflection on how states such as California, notorious for their sanctuary policies, routinely defy ICE detainers, refusing to hand over repeat offenders even after multiple criminal charges. This isn’t conjecture; it’s well documented in posts by analysts such as Victor Davis Hanson and Michael Shellenberger, who have drawn attention to California’s open defiance of federal immigration statutes.
Leith ignores the recent wave of riots and lawlessness that erupted in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, catalysed not by Trump’s rhetoric but by years of progressive enablement. And, of course, President Obama’s deportation of 3million illegal immigrants through expedited processes that did not involve court hearings elicited no howls of outrage from Leith or his ilk. Rather than holding their own failed policies accountable, Governor Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass blame ICE and Trump for attempting to implement federal law.
This narrative was dutifully parroted by the mainstream media, those same outlets that called the 2020 riots ‘mostly peaceful’ while flames raged in the background. Not to be outdone, an ABC reporter has this to say about this week’s rioting in California: ‘It could turn very volatile if you move law enforcement in there the wrong way and turn what is just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn into a massive confrontation and altercation between officers and demonstrators.’
None of this makes it into Leith’s righteous lament. In his narrative, Trump is the aggressor, ICE the stormtroopers, and the rioters merely citizens yearning to breathe free. Such framing is not only dishonest: it is dangerous.
David Hare’s ridiculous list of fascist traits
As for David Hare, his article barely pretends to offer anything but contempt. ‘Satire is nothing without contempt,’ he declares – except that what he offers is not satire but a screed. Hare presents a laundry list of 16 supposed ‘traits of fascism’. While interested readers can go through the list, a few examples might indicate Hare’s flippant approach: ‘withdrawal from international organisations’, ‘obsession with birth rates’, ‘elevation of the heterosexual family’, ‘extreme nationalism’, ‘persecution of particular racial groups’ and ‘attacks on cultural institutions’.
This pseudo-intellectual exercise at identifying fascism in real time is laughable for its lack of rigour. There is no effort to demonstrate how Trump’s actions map concretely on to these traits. For instance, when Trump has withdrawn the US from international organisations, it is on the grounds of national interest, transparency, or sovereignty: legitimate, democratically accountable decisions by a president who was elected on his campaign promises. The hyperbole from the legacy media that met President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement during his first term, for example, was extraordinary. The climate zealots saw it as a traitorous act of war against the American people. Never mind that the Paris agreement itself is a huge failure, containing no uniform commitments, no enforcement provisions but merely a voluntary set of what Krauthammer called ‘vaporous promises’.
Given that Hare is a playwright and screenwriter, that last fascist trait of Trump (‘attacks on cultural institutions’) leads him to declare: ‘With Donald Trump planning to turn the Kennedy Center in DC into his very own Bayreuth, we can surely say he is returning a full score card.’ While Hare may not share Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner, his charge may need some explanation for the non-literary among us:
‘The Bayreuth Circle was a name originally applied by some writers to devotees of Richard Wagner’s music who attended and supported the annual Bayreuth Festival in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. As some of these devotees espoused nationalistic German politics, and some of them were supporters of Adolf Hitler from the 1920s onwards, this group of people has been associated by some writers with the rise of Nazism.’
There we have it: Hare’s claim that Trump is just like Hitler and hence surely reflects the 16 ‘fascist traits’ listed. What exactly did President Trump’s plan to turn the Kennedy Center into ‘his very own Bayreuth’ entail? On Truth Social, Trump explains:
‘At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN. I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP! Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP.’
For Mr Hare, evidently, wanting to stop drag shows aimed at a youthful audience is fascistic.
Trump, courtly politics and the rule of law
Let’s be clear: criticisms of Trump’s style, rhetoric, comportment or policies are fair game. But the idea that he represents a unique threat to American democracy is laughable when examined against the facts.
Trump respected court orders even when they went against him. He left office peacefully despite contesting the validity of the 2020 elections which included a massive increase in the proportion of mailed-in ballots—a right Democrats exercised after 2000, 2004, and especially after 2016 with a vengeance. To date, Trump has faced more than 200 lawsuits and two impeachments. His judicial appointments followed constitutional procedure. He has sought lower taxes, strengthened borders, deregulation and relief from onerous green mandates and subsidies, consistent with his campaign promises – hardly the tools of a dictator.
In a recent YouTube interview, historian David Starkey compares Donald Trump to Henry VIII, noting Trump’s ‘monarchical tendencies’ such as treating Mar-a-Lago as a palace and his theatrical executive order signings akin to Henry’s courtly displays. Starkey argues Trump embodies politics as spectacle (‘Court’) as much as governance (‘Council’), a dynamic that Trump’s woke detractors fail to grasp.
This perspective illuminates the TDS seen in The Spectator’s hyperbolic articles by Sam Leith and David Hare, which brand Trump a fascist without evidence. Starkey’s comparison suggests that the derangement stems from the metropolitan elite’s inability to understand Trump’s populist appeal, rooted in cultural performance rather than policy alone. Like Henry VIII, who reshaped England’s identity, Trump’s actions, such as his Kennedy Center overhaul, challenge progressive norms, provoking elite outrage. TDS reflects a refusal to see Trump as a legitimate populist response to voter frustrations, instead demonising him as an existential threat to ‘democracy’.
If Trump truly seeks to be king, he is remarkably ineffective at it. And it would be nice if The Spectator’s literary and artistic contributors could avoid silly derangement about things Trumpian.
