Remember back in the old internet days when someone would post a photo of a guy who was 90 % covered in tattoos, had his tongue split, and stretched earlobes the size of hockey pucks? Or the woman who had actual silicone horns implanted on her forehead? The caption was always something like “Would you date this person?” or “Society is doomed.”
And the comments poured in:
“Disgusting.”
“Mentally ill.”
“How could anyone ruin themselves like that?”
People weren’t arguing with the person’s politics or character; they were having a full-body disgust reaction to how they looked. The visual short-circuited everything else.
Fast-forward to 15 years and swap the horn lady for Donald Trump.
Same reflex, different target.
A huge chunk of what gets called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” isn’t really about policy. A lot of it is pure aesthetic revulsion dressed up as moral superiority.
- The hair.
- The orange tan.
- The long ties and shiny suits.
- The Queens-meets-Vegas accent.
- The rambling sentences, the superlatives, the bragging.
To a certain class of people (mostly urban, credentialed, coastal or pseudo-coastal), Trump doesn’t just disagree with them; he embarrasses them. He looks and sounds like the guy who cut the line at the casino buffet. He’s the living embodiment of “tacky.”
And once that visceral “ew” switch flips in your brain, it’s almost impossible to judge the person fairly. Everything they do gets run through the Cringe Filter™ first, facts second.
It’s the exact same instinct that made people vomit bile in the comments under Lizardman photos, except now it’s coming from people who pride themselves on being tolerant and body-positive. Funny how that works.
I’m Canadian. I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’ve thought every American president in my lifetime was some flavour of crooked or compromised (and most Canadian PMs too, let’s be real). But watching the Trump hatred over the years, I kept thinking: we’re doing the same thing we used to do to the heavily modified kids, except this time the “freak” won the presidency. Twice.
Maybe the real derangement isn’t liking or hating the guy; it’s pretending our reactions are purely rational when half of them are just “he looks wrong and talks funny.”
We really do judge books by their covers. We just change which covers we’re allowed to judge out loud.
(And yeah, I know someone’s going to comment “But he’s literally Hitler!!!” Save it. I’ve seen the horn lady give calmer, more coherent interviews than half the talking heads on cable news.)
End of rant. Back to trying to fix my vampire sleep schedule.
And below is my personal favourite. Three guys … what do you see?
These are real people. Two convicted paedophiles currently in prison and a very successful small business owner … of a tattoo shop!