Trump Has Made People Deranged
The Left:
Trump has accomplished nothing -- he's a failure!
Also the Left:
Trump is a fascist dictator! Life is a NIGHTMARE!
These are equally common narratives by the left, and they are completely contradictory.
Either Trump is a do-little, laxidasical President, or he is a tyrannical authoritarian. He can't be both.
Why have so many people become deranged by Trump?
According to Scott Addams, creator of Dilbert (among other things), a vast swath of the American public is suffering from cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance
CD happens when a person's worldview doesn't conflate with reality, and they must either face the fact that their worldview was wrong and adapt (the much less common result) or double down on the faulty worldview to maintain their established bias.
The best example I've seen for this is if you are about to drink a frothy dark beer (like Guinness), and before you take your first sip you turn around and someone switches it with a CocaCola of exactly the same size and glass. You take a sip expecting the hearty, smooth flavor of Guinness but instead get the sweet, carbonated flavor of Coke. You experience cognitive dissonance because the flavor doesn't reflect what you were expecting.
How this pertains to Trump
There were millions of people who were told that Hillary was a sure thing and Trump had no chance of winning.
When people are told something consistently, frequently, over a long period of time, they begin to believe it.
So when Trump won the election, all the die-hard Hillary supporters (and all the people who simply hated Trump) were hit hard by cognitive dissonance. They were expecting one result, and instead got something that they thought was impossible.
When something that's impossible in your view happens, you can either address the newly-discovered reality and evaluate it objectively while adjusting your worldview to fit reality (rare), or you can double-down on the impossibility of the reality you are facing, which is how you end up with the whole Russia Narrative and racist, fascist dictator stuff.
What will happen?
Over the next few months the media will have to start reporting on Trump's objective achievements and failures for the first year of his time in office. When they do this people will begin to see the sources they trusted reporting that Trump has more-or-less been doing the same stuff that other Presidents have done (with the exception of his own unique additional flair).
At lease... that's what I hope will happen. Because I'm getting pretty tired of this deranged stuff >:(
What do you think?
Share your thought below.
I think this is an important phenomenon to discuss. It's not a new thing, but the way that Trump has intensified it has brought it to the forefront of the public. So it should be talked about!