What Is Trump Derangement Syndrome Really — And Do You Have It? by Jeff Callaway

What Is Trump Derangement Syndrome Really — And Do You Have It?

A Texas Outlaw Poet Catholic Investigative Autopsy of America's Most Misdiagnosed Condition

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them." — Psalm 113:16 (Douay-Rheims)

I. THE TABLE NOBODY SITS AT ANYMORE

Picture a Thanksgiving table in rural Texas, 2024. Two brothers. Same mother. Same blood. Same childhood bedroom where they once argued about baseball cards and who left the milk out. The mother is gone now — buried in October, three weeks before the election. One brother wore a MAGA hat to her funeral. The other had already called the police on his neighbor six months prior for posting a Trump yard sign in a subdivision where the HOA says signs are permitted.

They have not spoken in three years.

Neither of them goes to Mass much anymore. There isn't time, really, between the arguing online and the monitoring of cable news and the forwarding of memes designed to confirm what they already believed before they woke up that morning. Their mother went to daily Mass. She prayed the Rosary every night of her adult life. She died without seeing her sons in the same room together.

She was a woman of God. Her sons became men of the tribe.

This is not a hypothetical. This scene — or a version of it — has been lived out in hundreds of thousands of American homes over the past decade. Families fractured. Friendships destroyed. Parishes divided. Communities broken along a fault line that was never supposed to carry this much weight. A fault line built not from policy disagreement, not from honest debate, not from the kind of friction that healthy democracies require — but from something older and darker and more theologically precise than most Americans want to admit.

It is called idolatry.

And it has two faces.

II. THE BIRTH OF A DIAGNOSIS — AND A WEAPON

The term "Trump Derangement Syndrome" did not originate as a political slogan. It originated with Charles Krauthammer — a conservative political columnist and trained psychiatrist — who first coined the parallel phrase "Bush Derangement Syndrome" in 2003 to describe what he saw as irrational, disproportionate hatred of President George W. Bush. When Trump arrived on the national stage, the framework was dusted off and updated. Journalist Fareed Zakaria refined the Trump iteration as a hatred of the president so intense that it impairs the judgment of otherwise intelligent people.

On paper, the diagnosis is legitimate. Applied to its original target — irrational, disproportionate, fact-resistant hostility toward a political figure — it describes something real. Something observable. Something documented in clinical psychology under the related categories of confirmation bias, catastrophic thinking, and groupthink. We will get to all of that.

But here is where the term stopped being a diagnosis and became a weapon.

In 2025, Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio introduced the TDS Research Act, directing the National Institutes of Health to conduct formal research on Trump Derangement Syndrome. The bill defined the condition exclusively as an affliction of Trump's critics. A Minnesota state legislator proposed something similar, with language describing TDS as "acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons." Both proposals shared the same fundamental flaw: they treated the condition as a one-directional pathology. Critics of Trump can be deranged. Devotees of Trump cannot.

That is not medicine. That is marketing.

This article is not marketing. This article is surgery.

Because there are not one but two Trump Derangement Syndromes operating simultaneously in the American body politic. They run in opposite directions. They produce different symptoms. But they share the same root cause, the same psychological architecture, and the same spiritual diagnosis. And both of them — together — are dismantling something that took centuries to build.

The Church calls it what it is: idolatry. The psychologists call it what it is: motivated reasoning and identity fusion. The historians call it what it is: the warning sign that always appears before civilizations make catastrophic choices.

None of those diagnoses care about your party affiliation.

III. THE FIRST FORM: THE HATE MACHINE

Let us begin with the form that conservative America has documented extensively, because it deserves honest acknowledgment before we swing the spotlight.

The first TDS is real. It is documented. It is sometimes genuinely alarming.

It looks like this: university students requesting counseling services, therapy dog sessions, and extended exam deadlines following the results of a presidential election. It looks like grown adults posting on social media that they physically cannot function, cannot eat, cannot sleep — because a man they have never met won a democratic election in a constitutional republic. It looks like television panels of professional commentators weeping on air. It looks like celebrities promising to move to Canada, then not moving to Canada, then explaining why they did not move to Canada, then promising again — a loop so reliably comedic that the Canadians have stopped offering sympathy.

But it also looks like something far more serious.

A Utah man made over two thousand calls to the United States Capitol, threatening to kill Democratic lawmakers. Per FBI evidence, he was radicalized through a steady diet of anti-Trump media consumption that transformed legitimate political disagreement into violent ideation. In 2018, in Tucson, a man physically attacked a Trump supporter, telling police afterward that he had assumed the victim was a Neo-Nazi. He had made this determination based on a hat. In 2018 and 2019, pipe bombs were mailed to CNN, to Democratic politicians, and to prominent critics of the president — acts of political terrorism rooted in media-saturated radicalization on both ends of the spectrum.

Families were destroyed. Not metaphorically. The documentation is extensive: parents cut off by adult children who decided that a political disagreement constituted a moral emergency justifying the severing of blood ties. Siblings who attended the same church their entire lives and no longer speak. Lifelong friends — thirty, forty years of shared history — who blocked each other permanently over a Facebook post. One anti-Trump parent wrote publicly: "I love my oldest son dearly, but until this nightmare of a presidency is over, we simply cannot communicate."

That son's name was not mentioned. Neither was the mother's prayer life. But you can guess which one outlasted the other.

The psychology behind this form of TDS is well-documented in the clinical literature. Confirmation bias is the mechanism by which a person collects only the evidence that confirms what they already believe — and, research shows, being confronted with contradictory facts often deepens rather than loosens this grip. Emotional reasoning is the cognitive error of treating a feeling as evidence of a fact: "I feel that this is catastrophic, therefore it must be catastrophic." Catastrophic thinking transforms every policy dispute into an existential emergency. Groupthink converts the tribe's collective outrage into the individual's personal conviction without independent analysis ever occurring.

And then there is the parasocial relationship — the psychological phenomenon by which media saturation creates the illusion of intimate knowledge of a public figure. The person who watches four hours of Trump coverage daily does not know Donald Trump. But their brain has processed enough information about him to generate something that feels like knowledge, feels like a personal connection, feels like a genuine stake in his every action. When that figure is attacked, the brain responds as if something personal has been violated — because, in a cognitive sense, it has been.

This is real. This is documented. This deserves to be named.

Although — and this writer will confess it plainly — somewhere between the war drums and the four-dollar gas, the distance between their hysteria and legitimate prophecy has begun to feel uncomfortably narrow.

But it is only half the story. And the half that has been left out is the one that its sufferers will most strenuously deny.

IV. THE SECOND FORM: THE DEVOTION MACHINE

Swing the spotlight.

The second Trump Derangement Syndrome does not look like hysteria. It looks like loyalty. It markets itself as patriotism, as faith, as common sense, as standing firm against the enemies of America. It is far more difficult to identify precisely because its emotional register is positive rather than negative — devotion rather than hatred, reverence rather than contempt. But underneath the aesthetic difference, the psychological and spiritual mechanisms are identical.

Here is what it actually looks like.

In 2019, a major poll found that nearly two-thirds of self-identified Trump supporters stated that there was nothing — nothing — Donald Trump could do that would cause them to withdraw their support. They were not embarrassed by this answer. Some of them cited it as a point of pride: unwavering loyalty in a disloyal age. Donald Trump himself had anticipated this years before the poll confirmed it, standing on Fifth Avenue and telling a crowd that he could shoot someone and not lose votes. The crowd laughed and cheered. Nobody stopped to consider what they were cheering.

They were cheering at being told their loyalty has no floor.

The policy reversal evidence is meticulously documented. Trump ran as a trade protectionist and imposed sweeping tariffs — then reversed them on Mexico, then Canada, then China, then varied them by industry, then imposed them again, then negotiated exceptions — and through every iteration, the base called it genius. He promised to protect pre-existing conditions in healthcare while backing legislative proposals that independent analysts said would gut Medicaid. He promised to eliminate the national debt; the debt grew by trillions. He ran on opposition to H-1B high-skill visas for foreign workers, then embraced them, then opposed them again within weeks — and through each reversal, the base recalibrated.

The most striking documented case remains Bradley Bartell of Wisconsin, who voted for Trump in the 2024 election even while his Peruvian wife, Camila Muñoz, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a visa overstay. When asked whether he regretted his vote, Bartell said no. He supported the policy that separated him from his wife. He called it the right thing for the country.

There is a woman you married sitting in a federal detention facility, and you have no regrets.

The sociological research on this form of TDS draws from the academic literature on high-control groups and cult dynamics. Cult behavior researcher Bethany Burum, affiliated with Harvard's behavioral science research community, has noted that the MAGA political movement fits the "cultiness spectrum" in its core dynamic: members signal loyalty not to verifiable truth but to the group itself. Social penalties for dissent are real and swift. Agreement is rewarded. Criticism — even mild, even fact-based — is treated as betrayal.

Janja Lalich, a California State University sociologist and authority on totalistic movements, identifies four characteristics present in such groups: an all-encompassing belief system that explains everything; excessive devotion to a central leader; a systematic avoidance of internal criticism; and active disdain for those outside the group. All four characteristics are documentable in the movement's behavior.

Steven Hassan, whose BITE model analyzes high-control groups through the categories of Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion control, has argued that the infrastructure of modern Trumpism — Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Truth Social, conservative talk radio — functions as a virtual compound. No physical walls are needed. The information environment is constructed to be self-sealing: alternative sources are pre-emptively discredited, internal questions are socially penalized, and the leader's pronouncements are treated as the interpretive key to all reality.

The theological dimension of this second form is its most alarming feature.

By 2020, prominent figures within what broadly calls itself Christian nationalism had begun applying messianic language to Donald Trump with increasing explicitness. He was described as "the chosen one" — a phrase Trump himself used, reportedly in jest, though the audience that received it most seriously was not joking. Cabinet secretaries and prominent evangelical leaders described his presidency in terms drawn from prophetic Scripture, as a divine appointment to protect Christianity in America. MAGA rallies were described by social scientists not as campaign events but as revival meetings — featuring call-and-response crowd dynamics, ritual repetition of shared phrases and chants, an identified common enemy, and the charismatic authority of a central figure whose word carried the weight of revelation.

This is not what Christianity looks like. This is what Christianity looks like when it has been consumed by something else.

V. THE MIRROR: TWO MACHINES, ONE ENGINE

The critical insight — the one that neither camp will volunteer — is that both TDS forms are operating through the same psychological engine.

The anti-Trump form runs on hatred of a figure as the organizing principle of identity. The pro-Trump form runs on devotion to a figure as the organizing principle of identity. The trigger runs in opposite directions. The machinery is identical.

Both camps practice what psychologists call motivated reasoning — the unconscious process by which the mind works backward from a conclusion already emotionally committed to, constructing or selectively gathering evidence to justify what the gut has already decided. Both camps operate within media ecosystems deliberately designed and algorithmically optimized to monetize their particular form of emotional engagement. CNN and MSNBC built business models around Trump-hatred; Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax built business models around Trump-devotion. The outrage merchants on both sides do not care who wins the election. They make money on the chaos either way. They make more money when the chaos intensifies.

Both camps have produced real-world violence. January 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol is the most visible evidence of what the devotion machine produces when it is pushed to its limit. The July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump is evidence of what the hatred machine produces at its limit. Both events came from the same source: a human being whose political identity had become so fused with their sense of self that the perceived threat to one became intolerable.

Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," documented what happens when ideology replaces thinking as the primary cognitive mode: the individual ceases to function as a moral agent and becomes an instrument of the movement. They no longer reason from evidence to conclusion. They reason from conclusion to whatever evidence supports it, and they discard or discredit everything that does not. This is not a description of fascism exclusively. This is a description of any ideological possession severe enough to override independent moral judgment.

Both camps are in this condition. Neither can see it in themselves. Each can see it clearly in the other.

This is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

VI. THE CATHOLIC DIAGNOSIS: THIS HAS A NAME, AND THE CHURCH KNOWS IT

The Catholic Church has been watching this kind of disorder since before the United States existed. The theological tradition has language for it that is far older than the discipline of psychology, far more precise than political science, and far more honest than cable news.

It is called idolatry.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2113, states it plainly: "Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons, power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc."

The state. Power. The leader. The movement.

The Catechism does not hedge. The Church has seen this before. The Church was in Rome when Caesars demanded divine honors. The Church was in Germany when a political figure was treated as the salvific answer to a nation's humiliation and pain. The Church was in the Soviet Union when the party replaced the parish. The Church knows exactly what political idolatry looks like because the Church has outlived every political idol ever raised, and it will outlive these as well.

What the Church is less confident about is whether the people caught inside these movements will survive them with their souls intact.

Saint Augustine, writing in the fifth century in his masterwork "The City of God" and throughout the "Confessions," developed the concept scholars call the "ordo amoris" — the right ordering of love. Augustine's foundational insight is that sin is not primarily an act. It is a disordered love. We love the wrong things. We love the right things in the wrong measure. We love things that are good in themselves more than we love the God who made them, and in doing so, we corrupt both the love and ourselves.

He wrote in the Confessions: "He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake."

Augustine was not speaking of political candidates. But the principle applies with devastating precision. The man who organizes his entire moral universe around his hatred of a political figure loves that hatred more than he loves truth. The man who organizes his entire moral universe around his devotion to a political figure loves that devotion more than he loves God. In both cases, the love is disordered. In both cases, the idol — whether the object of hatred or the object of worship — has displaced what belongs only to God.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, building on Augustine in the Summa Theologiae, systematizes this further: love is an act of the will directed by reason toward its proper object. When reason fails, when passion overrides judgment, love goes wrong. The will pursues what feels like its object but is not. The result is not fulfillment but a progressive emptying — exactly what Psalm 113 describes in the verse that opened this article: "Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them."

The idol empties the worshipper.

The Catechism's treatment of conscience deepens the diagnosis. Paragraph 1790 affirms that a human being must always obey the certain judgment of conscience — but paragraph 1791 immediately qualifies this with a truth that neither TDS camp wants to hear: "This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility... when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin." And paragraph 1792 adds that errors of judgment arise from "enslavement to one's passions" and "rejection of the Church's authority and her teaching."

Both forms of TDS represent exactly this: a conscience blinded by degrees, through the habit of feeding the passion of tribal loyalty until the still small voice of truth cannot get through the noise of the algorithm.

The Prophet Isaias, in the passage spanning chapter forty-four, offers what remains the most devastating satire of idolatry ever written. He describes a man who cuts down a tree, uses half of it for firewood to cook his meal and warm himself, and then carves the other half into a god and falls down before it. He cannot see the absurdity of what he is doing because the smoke has gotten into his eyes. He cannot say, Isaias writes, "I have burned part of it in the fire, and upon the coals thereof I have baked bread, and have roasted flesh, and eaten, and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? Shall I fall down before the stock of a tree?" His eyes have been blinded. His heart has been deceived.

Sound familiar?

VII. THE MANUFACTURING PLANT: HOW THE MADNESS IS BUILT AND SOLD

Neither form of TDS arose organically. Both were cultivated, refined, and monetized by institutions whose financial interests depend entirely on keeping both tribes in a state of perpetual emotional engagement.

The social media algorithm does not care about truth. It cares about time-on-platform, which correlates directly with emotional intensity. Content that triggers outrage, fear, disgust, or tribal belonging holds the viewer longer than content that is merely informative or accurate. The platform optimizes accordingly. The viewer receives more and more of whatever produced the strongest reaction, which gradually narrows the information environment to a self-reinforcing loop of increasingly extreme content.

This is not speculation. It is the documented design of these systems, confirmed by internal research from multiple major platforms, congressional testimony, and independent academic study. The algorithm is not a neutral tool. It is a machine for manufacturing and maintaining the emotional states that generate revenue.

Cable news operates through an identical mechanism, with the added dimension of financial investment in specific tribal identities. CNN and MSNBC built audiences and revenue streams around the emotional energy of Trump-hatred. Every Trump scandal, every Trump tweet, every Trump controversy was content — not because it was necessarily the most important news of the day, but because it reliably produced the emotional responses that kept the audience watching and the advertisers paying. Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax built the mirror-image business model around Trump-devotion, with the same revenue logic running in the opposite direction.

The Brookings Institution's research on hostile elite rhetoric documents what happens downstream from this media environment: the normalization and amplification of prejudices that individuals previously kept private. What was once shameful to express becomes a badge of group identity. What was once whispered becomes shouted. What was once a fringe position becomes a mainstream tribal marker.

Both camps are customers. Not citizens. Customers.

The outrage industry sold them both a product — anger, in different flavors — and they bought it on subscription. The subscription renews every time they turn on their television, open their social media feed, or forward a meme to someone who already agrees with them.

And the companies take the money to the bank regardless of which side wins.

VIII. THE WRECKAGE: WHAT THIS HAS ACTUALLY COST

The human cost of this dual madness is not abstract.

It is the two brothers who will not speak. It is the Thanksgiving table with empty chairs. It is the woman sitting in a detention facility while her husband tells reporters he has no regrets. It is the parents who say they love their children but cannot communicate with them. It is the MAGA voter whose adult children have refused contact for years, whose marriages collapsed, whose social world narrowed to the rally and the feed — until the rally ended and the feed went quiet and he was alone in a way that no political movement can fix.

Communities that once argued about city council minutes now argue about federal politics at school board meetings, at Sunday potlucks, at the diner counter. Churches that once unified their members around the Sacraments now fracture along the same lines as the cable news schedule. The language of politics has colonized spaces that were never meant to bear that weight.

For millions of Americans, political allegiance has displaced religious practice as the primary source of meaning, community, moral identity, and hope. The MAGA rally has become a revival meeting — call and response, shared enemies, a charismatic leader who understands us when nobody else does. The anti-Trump resistance has become its own liturgy of righteous grievance — a community united by what it opposes, sustained by the certainty of its own moral superiority, faithful in its outrage the way the devout are faithful in their prayer.

Neither of these is feeding the soul.

Both of them are feeding something. The Church has a name for that something too, and it is not flattering.

IX. THE PATH: WHAT A CATHOLIC ACTUALLY DOES WITH POLITICS

No politician — not Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, not Barack Obama, not Ronald Reagan, not any human being who has ever sought or held public office — is above moral evaluation. The Catholic is called to apply the same standard to every human being in power. Not a Republican standard or a Democratic standard. The standard of the Gospel and the natural law.

The moment any political figure becomes exempt from criticism by virtue of tribal belonging, idolatry has already begun. The moment any political figure becomes the organizing principle of a person's moral universe — whether as the object of devotion or the object of hatred — that person has replaced God with a creature. They have committed, in Augustine's terms, the foundational error of disordered love.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a party platform. The Beatitudes do not register for primary elections. The Corporal Works of Mercy — feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick, ransoming the captive, burying the dead — are not subject to executive order or legislative session. They are the permanent, unchanging demands of the Christian life on every believer, regardless of who occupies the White House or which party controls the Senate.

What is required is intellectual honesty — the willingness to apply the same moral standard to the politician you support that you would apply to the politician you oppose. What is required is moral consistency — if deficit spending was fiscal irresponsibility under Obama, it remains fiscal irresponsibility under Trump; if executive overreach was tyranny under Biden, it remains tyranny under Trump. What is required is the courage to critique those who share your values when they act contrary to those values — because without that courage, you are not a moral agent. You are a fan.

Christ is the politics. The rest is details.

X. THE ROAST: LIGHTS UP, BOTH CAMPS CENTER STAGE

And now — having established the medical record, the theological diagnosis, the psychological evidence, and the historical warning — it is time to do what the prophets did when the people needed to hear something they desperately did not want to receive.

We laugh at ourselves. Or rather: we are laughed at. Together. Equally. Without mercy.

THE ANTI-TRUMP TDS WARD

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Anti-Trump TDS Ward, where the therapy dogs are exhausted, the safe spaces are operating at full capacity, and MSNBC runs on a continuous loop like a hospital heart monitor that flatlined sometime around November 2016 and never found its rhythm again.

You promised to move to Canada. You promised this in 2016, and again in 2020, and again in 2024. Canadian customs agents now have a pre-printed form that reads simply: "We know. Light's on." You have been threatening this departure for nine years. Ontario is going broke keeping the welcome mat lit.

You requested therapy dogs after a presidential election. A dog. Not after a death in the family. Not after a cancer diagnosis. After an election. Somewhere out there, Christians are being martyred in Nigeria. Churches are burning in Syria. Five-year-olds are being trafficked across borders. And you needed a golden retriever because the electoral college map turned red.

The dog did not understand why it was there. But it was a professional, and it kept its opinions to itself.

You screamed "this is literally Hitler" about a man who spent his free weekends playing golf at his own resort in Palm Beach. Hitler had ambitions for the military conquest of an entire continent. This man has ambitions for a better short game and a branded line of steaks. These are not the same ambitions.

You sent pipe bombs through the mail. You assaulted people in parking lots for wearing hats. You made a baseball cap into a symbol of such concentrated evil that physically attacking its wearer was justified in your mind as an act of moral resistance. A hat. Somewhere in the long history of Western civilization's confrontation with genuine tyranny — with actual gulags, actual concentration camps, actual dungeons — someone is looking at your hat-based moral emergency and trying to find words adequate to the situation.

They are not finding them.

Some of you cut off your mothers. Your mothers. The women who bore you, raised you, prayed over you while you slept — and you stopped speaking to them because they voted differently. You sent your children to college and they came home unable to eat at the same table as the people who paid for the tuition. You marched through city streets in coordinated hats, leaving behind you a landscape of broken glass and overturned garbage cans, and you filed the footage under "righteous resistance."

You are not the resistance. You are the reaction. And reactions without reason are just chemistry.

You claimed the moral high ground so aggressively and for so long that you ran out of oxygen. And it shows. It shows in the certainty with which you make claims you cannot support. It shows in the contempt with which you treat people who disagree. It shows in the fact that you abandoned every institution and authority that might have told you something you did not want to hear — and then you wondered why the echo chamber had only one voice.

Your celebrities flew private jets to climate summits to lecture the working class about carbon footprints. Your intellectuals wrote books about empathy that they had clearly not read. Your late-night comedians spent eight years making the same joke and then expressed genuine surprise when the country stopped laughing.

That was not comedy. That was a liturgy. And you attended every service.

THE MAGA DEVOTION WARD

Swing the spotlight.

Welcome to the other wing — where the flags are the size of commercial aircraft, the merchandise is abundant, and the theological framework for the current presidency is being developed in real time by people who have read Revelation primarily as a political forecast for the current news cycle.

You voted for a man who promised to protect your job, reduce your cost of living, end foreign wars, and pay off the national debt. Then came the tariffs, and the counter-tariffs, and the tariff exemptions, and the tariff reversals, and the negotiations, and the deals that looked a great deal like the situations that existed before the tariffs. The national debt grew. The cost of living rose. And you called all of it "the art of the deal."

Brother, that is not art. That is a shell game. And you are pointing enthusiastically at the wrong cup.

A man in Wisconsin voted for the candidate whose immigration policy resulted in his own wife being detained by federal authorities. His wife. His actual wife. He was asked, on the record, whether he regretted this. He said no. He said he supported the policy.

There is a woman he married sitting in a detention facility. He is on social media calling other people deranged.

The derangement is calling from inside the house.

You had a poll — a formal, documented, published poll — in which nearly two-thirds of you stated that there was nothing Donald Trump could do to lose your support. Nothing. And the man himself told you the same thing, years earlier, on Fifth Avenue, and you cheered. You cheered at being informed, explicitly, by the man himself, that your loyalty has no floor. That is not devotion to a leader. That is a signed blank check handed to a man who has already told you he intends to use it.

Your preachers called him the chosen one. Cabinet secretaries echoed the language of prophecy. Let us sit with this carefully, because it deserves careful treatment: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God who fashioned the cosmos from nothing, who parted seas and raised the dead and sent His only begotten Son to suffer and die for the redemption of all humanity — allegedly selected, as His instrument for the preservation of Christian civilization, a thrice-married casino operator from Manhattan with a history of documented business bankruptcies and a personal theological vocabulary that does not extend much beyond "beautiful" and "tremendous."

The Almighty has worked through unlikely instruments before. Moses had a speech impediment. David was an adulterer and a murderer. But even accounting for the full breadth of divine creative authority, the paperwork on this one is going to require some careful examination.

You defended, under Trump, the precise positions you denounced as unconstitutional, treasonous, or fiscally irresponsible under Obama and Biden. Deficit spending. Executive overreach. Unilateral foreign policy decisions. Presidential immunity from congressional oversight. Every one of these you called a crisis under the previous administration. Every one of them you rebranded as leadership under this one. You did not change your principles. You discovered that your principles were, all along, a jersey. And jerseys look different depending on which team is wearing them.

You have more Trump merchandise in your home than you have books about the faith you claim to be defending. More rally T-shirts than Sunday missals. You drove six hours to stand in the rain in a parking lot to hear a man read from a teleprompter things you already believed before you woke up that morning — and you came home and told people it changed your life.

A movement is supposed to move you toward something higher. Where, exactly, are you going?

THE DOUBLE-BARRELED CLOSING: BOTH CAMPS, FINAL ROUND

Here is the truth that both of you are going to hate in precisely equal measure.

You need each other. Not because you are right — you are both catastrophically, historically, theologically, and psychologically wrong in ways that will take scholars decades to fully catalogue. You need each other because without the other side's existence, you would have no identity remaining. The anti-Trump camp would have to face the fact that the party it defends sold out the American working class thirty years before Donald Trump descended that escalator. The pro-Trump camp would have to face the fact that the man they have organized their entire moral universe around has no fixed ideology whatsoever — only fixed self-interest, which is a very different thing.

Both of you are being played. Both of you purchased a ticket to a show that has been running for a decade, and neither of you has stood up and walked out. The show does not end because the ticket-holders leave. But the ticket-holders go home empty every single time, and they come back the next night and buy another ticket, and the producers take the money to the bank.

The Church calls this idolatry. The Catechism names it precisely, without embarrassment, in paragraph 2113. Saint Augustine diagnosed it fifteen centuries before social media existed, and his prescription has not changed: rightly ordered love. God first. Everything else beneath and through that primary love. When the order is inverted, everything falls apart — and you can document the falling apart in the wreckage of American families, American communities, and American souls over the past ten years.

You do not need deprogramming. You need repentance.

Not the political kind — not a press release, not a pivot, not a rebranding of your tribal identity. The real kind. The kind that happens on your knees, in silence, before the One whose authority over history is not subject to any election cycle.

XI. THE MIRROR AND THE WARNING

Are you seeking truth, or defending a tribe?

Those two things cannot live in the same house for long. One of them will eventually have to leave. And the one that leaves tends to leave quietly, without announcement, until one day you look up from the feed and the argument and the outrage and the merchandise and you realize you cannot remember the last time you heard something true that surprised you. Because you stopped going anywhere truth might surprise you a long time ago.

The warning from history is not complicated. Civilizations that replaced God with political messiahs have paid for it. Always. Without a single recorded exception. The Romans paid. The revolutionaries paid. The nationalist movements of the twentieth century paid — in blood, in ruin, in the slow grinding moral catastrophe of watching ordinary people do extraordinary evil because the ideology had replaced the conscience.

The warning from Scripture is older than any of that: "Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them." The idol empties the worshipper. Not immediately. Gradually. By degrees, the way the conscience is blinded by degrees, the way the love becomes disordered by degrees — until the man is standing with half a tree in his hands and cannot see that he carved a god from the same wood he burned to keep warm.

Both camps of TDS — the haters and the devotees — are running on empty. And the deepest tragedy is not the foolishness of the position or the absurdity of the arguments or even the human wreckage left in the wake of this decade-long performance.

The deepest tragedy is that most of them used to have something better.

Most of them had faith. Most of them had community. Most of them had mothers who prayed the Rosary and fathers who kept their word and families that sat down together at a table and broke bread without checking the news first.

And they traded all of it in for a bumper sticker and a cable news subscription.

The rest of us — the bewildered, the normal, the people standing shocked at the edge of this brawl wondering how in the world it came to this — we are not the fringe. We are the majority. We are the ones who still believe that a politician is a servant, not a savior. We are the ones who still believe that the man next to us at Mass is our brother whether he voted red or blue. We are the ones who still believe that truth is not a tribal possession but a gift from God, freely given, available to anyone willing to stop screaming long enough to receive it.

Come back to the table.

Both of you.

The food is getting cold, and the chairs have been empty long enough.

~ Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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