The Atlantic magazine's unintentionally hilarious IF TRUMP WINS series warns its readers of the scary apocalyptic future should Donald Trump emerge victorious in 2024, but Helen Lewis brought a mildly moderating tone to the flock, urging the Trump-loathing readers not to "go bonkers" again as they did after Trump won in 2016. Should the unthinkable happen again, Lewis urged her readers not to go full mental jacket as explained in the title, "THE LEFT CAN’T AFFORD TO GO MAD."
The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let’s be honest, they also sent many on the left completely around the bend. Some liberals, particularly upper-middle-class white ones, cracked up because other people couldn’t see what was obvious to them: that Trump was a bad candidate and an even worse president.
The clinical term for that ailment is Trump Derangement Syndrome which is a subset of Just Plain Nuts!
Rather than focusing on how to oppose Trump’s policies, or how to expose the hollowness of his promises, the resistance simply wished Trump would disappear. Many on the left insisted that he wasn’t a legitimate president, and that he was only in the White House because of Russian interference.
Hmmm... Lewis is close to admitting here that Trump-Russia Collusion which the media obsessed about for over two years was a hoax. She's hinting at election denial. It continued:
Social media made everything worse, as it always does; the resistance became the #Resistance. Instead of concentrating on the hard work of door-knocking and community activism, its members tweeted to the choir, drawing no distinction between Trump’s crackpot comments and his serious transgressions. They fantasized about a deus ex machina—impeachment, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the pee tape, outtakes from The Apprentice—leading to Trump’s removal from office, and became ever more frustrated as each successive news cycle failed to make the scales fall from his supporters’ eyes. The other side got wise to this trend, and coined a phrase to encapsulate it: “Orange Man Bad.”
She was on the mark with her "Orange Man Bad" analysis, and you can't argue that the left distinguished itself by imagining Trump could be removed from office at any moment, with "the walls" constantly "closing in" on him. Imagination and speculation about "The End" was their daily ritual. Lewis concluded:
The path back to sanity in the United States lies in persuasion—in defending freedom of speech and the rule of law, in clearly and calmly opposing Trump’s abuses of power, and in offering an attractive alternative. The left cannot afford to go bonkers at the exact moment America needs it most.
The left can't afford to "go bonkers" but their extreme TDS guarantees they will do so... and provide great comedy entertainment along the way.
