I’ve often heard it said that people who deplore President Trump — as regards both his personal and political life, and persist in calling him out on it — are afflicted with something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But as I see it, his supporters are the ones stricken with it. 

How else to account for the adulation they’ve lavished on him as God’s “chosen one,” leading the charge in the “re-Christianizing” of America, his egregious immorality and criminality notwithstanding? I’m talking derangement on stilts. 

Trump’s been hailed by them as a modern-day Cyrus the Great, the 6th-century BCE founder of the Persian Empire famous for liberating the Jews from Babylonian captivity. This is what britannica.com writes of him:  He was “the epitome of the great qualities expected of a ruler, (one) who was tolerant and magnanimous as well as brave and daring.”  Other sources I consulted say the same.

That doesn’t sound to me like an egotist of epic proportions, like a relentless liar, a cold-hearted xenophobe or a world leader who’d stoop to mocking the disabled and insulting the war dead as “suckers” and “losers.” 

President Trump, “the epitome of the great qualities expected of a ruler”? Not hardly. A piece of work unequaled, not a single redeeming quality to his name — that’s the description that rings true to me.

William LaRochelle
Lewiston