How the Cheney mind succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome

Trump Derangement Syndrome can make people do strange and frightening things. It can goad a state's attorney into trying to throw someone in jail for making a perfectly legal “hush money” payment to an alleged paramour. It can lead law enforcement to charge individual citizens with violations of Sarbanes-Oxley (which deals with the financial reporting obligations of public companies.) 

It can cause the U.S. Justice Department officials to spread disinformation, to the public and to the legislators who oversee them, that Joe Biden's son's real laptop is actually part of a Russian plot. It also induces the media to fall blindly and eagerly into believing such government-sponsored hoaxes. 

Trump Derangement Syndrome can provide an excuse for politicians, commentators and media voices alike to ignore for months the obviously diminished mental capacity of the most powerful man in the world. It can even cause them to mercilessly attack as charlatans those who try to raise a red flag to indicate the obvious.

And that is just the impact of Trump Derangement Syndrome on Democrats, liberals, progressives and all of those in the media who cling breathlessly to the fiction that they are impartial journalists.

Trump Derangement Syndrome can also affect Republicans, conservatives and populists. Trump really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue on camera, and some of them would defend it. Some of them are willing to stick their heads in the sand while the erstwhile party of small government and fiscal discipline espouses spending plans that would make a drunken sailor’s eyes water.

Yet Trump Derangement Syndrome's most interesting victims are those formerly popular or powerful within the Republican Party, who are now struggling to stay relevant in a world that doesn't care about them anymore. Trump Derangement Syndrome makes these people say and do really, really stupid things.  

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), for example, has decided that "this time around…it’s important to actually cast a vote for Vice President Harris.” Her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, says he “will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.” Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) piled on at the Democratic National Convention:  “I urge you: Make the right choice. Vote. Vote for our bedrock values. And vote for Kamala Harris.”

I know there are Republicans who won’t be voting for Trump in November, and I get it, even though I don’t agree with them. But to take the additional step of actually voting for Harris has to be a product of Trump Derangement Syndrome warping the Republican mind. They are wholeheartedly adopting the Democrats' ends-justify-the-means approach to keeping Trump out of office a second time, even if they have to destroy democracy in the process. 

A Trump no-vote protest is one thing. A Republican vote for Harris, however, is an effective reversal of all the values one has ever espoused. One must ask the Cheneys, Kinzinger and others taking this path now whether they were ever telling the truth before about what they believed in. 

A vote for Harris is an endorsement of a fracking ban; an electric vehicle mandate that defies not only consumer demand but also the physics of electrical distribution; reparations for slavery; decriminalization of illegal border crossings; guaranteed Green New Deal federal jobs for anyone who wants them; Medicare for all; and a mandatory gun buyback program, which is really just gun-confiscation.

Do those things reflect “our bedrock values” that Kinzinger mentioned in Chicago? 

Sure, Harris is now trying to go back on some of the positions she espoused in the recent past. But she’s waffled so much that “even some of her own staffers aren’t sure where she stands on a range of issues.” 

The sad part here is that many of the "Republicans for Harris" are among those who have lamented for years that American politics doesn’t focus enough on the issues. They are now endorsing a candidate who can't even keep her own story straight about her own positions on the issues.

If you’ve got a bad enough case for Trump Derangement Syndrome, you’d apparently vote for Che Guevara instead of him. Perhaps there's an added inducement of a meaningless appointment in the next administration if Trump loses.

I count myself among the many Americans – including many Republicans – who remain saddened by Jan. 6, 2021. I quit my job over it. And I think it will remain a stain on our history for generations to come. But there is a vast distance between that and the belief that Trump is going to end American democracy.

One of the reasons that Trump is doing so well in the 2024 campaign may be that many people worry that, all things considered, the policies Harris has espoused – and the sort of federal government that Trump Derangement Syndrome encourages – are a much greater threat to this country than anything Donald Trump is likely to do.

Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.