Having coined Bush Derangement Syndrome more than a decade ago, I feel authorized to weigh in on its most recent offshoot. What distinguishes Trump Derangement Syndrome is not just general hysteria about the subject, but additionally the inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences on the one hand and signs of psychic pathology on the other.

Take Trump’s climate-change decision. The hyperbole that met his withdrawal from the Paris agreement — a traitorous act of war against the American people, America just resigned as leader of the free world, etc. — was astonishing, though hardly unusual, this being Trump.

What the critics don’t seem to recognize is that the Paris agreement itself was a huge failure. It contained no uniform commitments and no enforcement provisions. Sure, the whole world signed. But onto what? A voluntary set of vaporous promises. China pledged to “achieve the peaking of CO2 emissions around 2030.” Meaning that they rise for another 13 years.

The rationale, I suppose, is that developing countries like India and China should be given a pass because the West had a two-century head start on industrialization.

I don’t think the West needs to apologize — or pay — for having invented the steam engine. In fact, I’ve long favored a real climate-change pact, strong and enforceable, that would impose relatively uniform demands on China, India, the U.S., the E.U. and any others willing to join.

Paris was nothing but hot air. Withdrawing was a perfectly plausible policy choice (the other being remaining but trying to reduce our CO2-cutting commitments). The subsequent attacks on Trump were all the more unhinged because the president’s other behavior over the last several weeks provided ample opportunity for shock and dismay.

It’s the tweets, of course. Trump sees them as a direct, “unfiltered” conduit to the public. What he doesn’t quite understand is that for him — indeed, for anyone — they are a direct conduit from the unfiltered id. They erase whatever membrane normally exists between one’s internal disturbances and their external manifestations.

For most people, who cares? For the president of the United States, there are consequences. When the president’s id speaks, the world listens.

Consider his tweets mocking the mayor of London after the most recent terror attack. They were appalling. This is a time when a president expresses sympathy and solidarity — and stops there. Trump can’t stop, ever. He used the atrocity to renew an old feud with a minor official of another country. Petty in the extreme.

Source:  Charles Krauthammer, newsmax.com