The new Catch-22

In Trumpworld we’re all sort of deranged

I’m not sure if the phrase ‘Catch-22’ is as common today as it was for my generation. If not it should be, because if anything it’s more relevant now than when first coined by author Joseph Heller in his novel ‘Catch-22’.

It broadly means being caught in a situation where whatever you do you’re in a mess – ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The novel was set in the dangerous world of a bomber squadron in World War Two. The anti-hero lead character, Yossarian, wanted to avoid flying further combat missions. He was told by the combat doctor, Daneeka, that without physical injury the only way to avoid combat was to be declared insane…but there was a catch.

“You mean there’s a catch?”

“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

This came to mind when the definitely crazy Donald Trump issued his deranged and sickening comments following the death of filmmaker, Rob Reiner, director of, among other classics, ‘When Harry Met Sally’, ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘A Few Good Men.’

Before the tragedy further deepened with the arrest of Reiner’s son for the murder of both Rob Reiner and his mother Michelle, Trump wrote on social media, “Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before.”

I don’t think I need to dwell on the sheer loathsome nature of this post at so many levels, but what also occurred to me was that in one way Trump was right – he did, in a strictly non-medical informal sense of the word, drive Reiner crazy. Just like he drives me, and most likely you, crazy. And so he should.

So if you think what Trump’s doing is somehow normal then you’re crazy, and if the insanity of his actions is not driving you crazy, then you’re not. Catch-22.

Taking this further then I’d say there are two distinct strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The first is that of Reiner, myself and many of you. Let’s call ours TDS-A.

We look at what he’s doing, and his increasing descent into delusional, malignant narcissism and think, Whisky Tango Foxtrot? How can this be happening, how can it go on? Reiner – a very eloquent critic of Trump – said of him several years back, “Donald Trump is the single most unqualified human being to ever assume the presidency of the United States. He is mentally unfit.”

And Trump’s descent into his own very personal derangement seems ever more obvious. The Reiner post disturbed even many of his own loyalists, but it’s hardly the only bizarre action this week.

In the White House there is a corridor where previous presidential portraits are hung. It’s meant to be a dignified, reflective record of America’s presidential history. No more. The manchild’s acolytes have now added plaques underneath them slagging off the record of his Democratic predecessors with typically childish language, lies and prejudices. Such toddler antics illustrate the lack of seriousness which so much of Trump’s team demonstrate. The world’s going to shit while they giggle about ‘owning the libs’ and play stupid pranks.

Meanwhile other groups of his acolytes seize any opportunity to suck up to their king and indulge his bottomless narcissism, most recently renaming the Kennedy Center – the capital’s cultural centre – the Trump Kennedy Center. Trump’s interest in culture of course doesn’t extend much beyond his support for World Wrestling, but hey it annoys the ‘liberal elites’ who do, so let’s do it.

It was the response to the latter that brought to mind the other strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Maria Shriver, niece of JFK, after the centre was named put out an anguished post saying, “Can we not see what is happening here? C’mon, my fellow Americans! Wake up! This is not dignified. This is not funny.”

She quickly got her answer in the comments that followed as the MAGA crowd piled on. If you want to despair for the future of humanity then the cesspit that is now X is the place to go. Quickly the comments largely became aggressively supportive of whatever Trump did and nastily critical of Shriver. It’s a pattern I’ve seen whenever someone posts something that might challenge the MAGA world view. Do they spend all day roaming X looking for someone to insult and get angry about?

This is the other strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome, let’s call it TDS-B, and far more dangerous. This is the MAGA cult. I use the word ‘cult’ advisedly because they usually exhibit many of the symptoms of cult followers. At the core is the belief Trump can do no wrong.

That means a variety of forms of cognitive dissonance. So they avoid disapproving of something by dismissing it as ‘just Trump being Trump’; or treating it as something of little consequence. Evangelical Christians seek to cover their hypocrisy in supporting a non-churchgoing amoral adulterer by saying God uses imperfect instruments to implement his supposed will.

Most common is distraction and diversion by ‘whataboutism’ and attacking his opponents and their motives to avoid engaging with what he’s actually done. Meanwhile they stay within their bubble where uncomfortable facts, thoughts and arguments rarely penetrate.

That’s why the Epstein case has been an issue. For us mere TDS-A sufferers the Epstein issue, unsavoury though it is, is less of a deal. However, for TDS-B victims the Epstein Files conspiracy is deeply rooted in their core narrative and has been massively fertilised inside their bubble. It’s integral to the TDS-B strain. It makes it harder for the usual cognitive dissonance booster vaccines to work.

And Trump’s remarks about Reiner also strike a dissonant chord. Publicly, Americans – when they’re not posting anonymously on X – tend to be a courteous bunch and this didn’t sit well. It’s no coincidence some parts of MAGA have been showing signs of strain and dissent, for instance Marjorie Taylor Greene on both Epstein and Reiner. As an extreme loyalist she’s expressed surprise at the way Trump turned on her over it, but anyone without TDS-B could have told her that loyalty is a one-way street when it comes to Trump. He’s only interested in fealty.

There are also signs of disquiet among MAGA over where Trump’s pathologies are taking him. Having gained power by promising to ‘drain the swamp’, his palling up with billionaires and self-aggrandisement is an ever more obvious contradiction as he plans a massive gold-laden White House ballroom while calling the ‘affordability’ problems of his supporters a ‘con’.

And of course the more his narcissism is indulged the worse it gets. Surrounded as he is by acolytes and yes men/women, who is there to challenge his bottomless self-regard as he spirals ever downwards. It is a form of derangement that’s ever more obvious, especially given his mania for naming things after himself and plastering his face all over the place, often absurdly, such as saying he looks similar to Elvis Presley.

We all laughed at Turkmenistan when its former dictator renamed the months, with January named after himself. Is this so very different? What next?[i]

Well, we kind of know. The US Mint is planning $1 coins to celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the United States, and the proposal is to have the face of Trump on them, although the legality of this is pretty dubious. Trump himself has variously said that only Washington and Lincoln may be above him as a president. You don’t have to be deranged to consider this kind of egotism as pretty alarming in anyone with his kind of power.

But will they break with him? Doubtful. Because TDS-B also has many of the features of an addiction. MAGA is not just some strongly-held political belief but effectively a cult. Such followers of Trump identify totally with him, and he and MAGA have become integral to what they are. An attack on him is an attack on them, their sense of what and who they are. Also, having committed so deep and hard, how can they admit they’ve been wrong all along? That’s an enormous hole to dig yourself out of, most likely in the face of an angry response from your social group.

The gang around him are also locked in. Some will be cult followers, but even the ones that aren’t, the fanatics like Stephen Miller, or the cynical power hungry, like JD Vance, are also in too deep. Their future is tied to him. To be sure they will be jockeying to inherit his mantle, and likely roll their eyes at his antics, but they will also know that right now if he falls, they fall – none of them inspire anything like the support and all of them are guilty by association. This is why they are all working so hard to rewire the US system ready for the post-Trump era.

So, what does this mean for us?

- At the outset, we should recognise symbols matter. His post on Reiner may seem trivial at one level, but it exemplifies so much about him that we can all understand. The same applies to considering what motivates a man so keen to rename things after himself. And what it says about someone who spends time preparing elaborate, childish insults to his predecessors. We can argue about the rights and wrongs of tariffs, Ukraine/Russia and so on, but these apparently lesser things truly reveal the nature of the man. This is an increasingly imperial presidency and the personality that did all this is quite literally deciding the fate of nations. The way he demeaned Reiner is not so very different from the way he speaks of Europe’s leaders.

- He’s getting worse. It’s hard to imagine all this from his first term of office – indeed, for all his nonsenses from that first term, I can’t think of comparable examples. To this we could add his increasingly public, jaw-dropping rudeness and insults to journalists, usually women.

- No-one around him is going to stop him - some indeed are emulating him. They are either in his cult, so prey to TDS-B, or in too deep to do anything other than go along with him. We have to assume this is the pattern for the next three years at least.

- His pathologies – his derangement – make it foolish to trust or rely on his word. Driven by his narcissism, his penchant for holding grudges, his reliance on instinct and emotion, then everything is about him, and he will swivel on a dime (or soon, maybe a Trump dollar).

To me it confirms a sense that we need to adapt how we respond to him. I have long thought that any tactical benefits we gain from sucking up to him don’t necessarily help us strategically in the longer term because it feeds his narcissistic addiction and imperialist grandiosity that he alone can fix things and is always right.

Telling him he’s always right won’t help when sooner or later we have to tell him he’s wrong and our paths have diverged to the point where sucking up can’t plaster over the faultlines. Because that divergence is coming. Neither is sweet persuasion going to work – his narcissistic derangement means it will never be enough, especially after we keep giving him credit even for things that he hasn’t done, such as ending eight wars.

For Trump the personal is political and Trump’s personal actions show what he is – do we really think he looks at anyone or anything else through anything other than that personal lens? And of course, money.

No wonder we have TDS-A! The horrible irony is that Trump is driven by the need to be in our face all the time, yet how can we resist in our differing ways unless we acknowledge what’s happening?

One of the disturbing things about our current state is the normalisation by so many of the abnormal and so failing to rise to the scale of the challenge we face. This is not normal, it’s very, very serious and if it doesn’t drive you a bit crazy you’re not paying attention. He wants our attention, and in our way, to work out how to respond, we have to give it.

There’s a jokey saying, ‘Just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not after you.’ In Trumpworld it’s more, ‘Just because you’re deranged it doesn’t mean the world isn’t insane.’

Catch-22.

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[i] As I wrote this ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was on TV. In it the hero, George Bailey (James Stewart) is shown what life would be like if he had not existed. One change is that the idyllic town of Bedford Falls comes under the grip of the avaricious, money-grubbing Henry F Potter – who renames the town, which he corrupts, Pottersville.