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The other week on YouTube I came across Doctor Elliot’s channel. The doctor is a psychiatrist practicing in the United Kingdom, and I stumbled on his channel following doctors reacting to The Pitt and its medical accuracy.

In one of the videos Dr. Elliot swung into precisely how delusion is defined by modern psychiatry, that it is a belief that is false, fixed, and unshakeable.

A little epiphany lit up in my head.

As someone who has stood against Trump since before he came down that escalator, (I have never liked the man or any of his public appearances and never watched the damned show that propelled him to an office he is wholly unfit for.) his supporters have diagnosed me with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Their accusation of ‘derangement’ costs me not one moment of sleep. I know that I have not elided any of my core principles to stay acceptable to the mob.

What did light up for me was thinking about those Republicans old enough to have been supporters and voters as far back as Regan. The ones who proclaimed loudly and with such apparently firm conviction that their political positions did not arise from grubby self-interest but rather solid and well thought out philosophies. The supporters who now have spun their deeply held convictions into support for a philandering, greedy, corrupt, man of such low character you would not trust him to watch your wallet while you visited the restroom.

Why?

Because they are deluded that the Democratic Party is always the worse option. It is their fixed, false, and unshakable belief that the Democrats must always be the wrong choice that traps them with Trump.

This is not true for every single person that voted for Trump in 2024. Many voted because they were unhappy with conditions as they experienced them in the two years leading up to the election. Some tried to argue with these people that it wasn’t really that bad, using charts and numbers and data to prove their point but they missed that the motivation wasn’t empirical but emotional. There’s a reason why the Trump coalition had a larger share of infrequent voters than Harris’.

Some voted for Trump because he was exactly what they wanted, a cruel racist man promising to make the lives of those for whom they shared contempt for tough and unpleasant.

Some voted for Trump because there were goodies to be had, taxes to be cut.

But there remains that segment deluded with the belief that the Democrats are always the wrong choice, firm in the fixed, false, and unshakable convictions which are in actuality bereft of any actual convictions.