I am at a loss to explain the Cult of Trump.

He is neither articulate nor inspiring.

He casts no aura of competence or concern.

He is not admired or respected but inexplicably feared.

He has never written anything memorable or notable.

His personal and professional lives are filled with betrayal and failure.

And yet millions of Americans are mesmerized by him, placed into a catatonic state of blind devotion.

Helen Arendt, a brilliant writer and researcher who crafted a fundamental and articulate explanation for the rise of Nazism in an intellectually advanced and otherwise rational Germany, explains it this way.

If a society feels disconnected, and the perception of decline of white, primarily male, dominance fulfills this role in the US, they seek someone who will do two things. Identify the enemy (in this case Immigrants, DEI, and progressiveness) and offer them a solution.

Mr. Trump does this while ignoring the courts, sending armies of occupation into America cities, and emasculating Congress, all to rousing cheers of the faithful. Perhaps not as drastic as the Final Solution but nevertheless horrifying in its usurping of civil rights, discourse, and conduct.

I’ve come to realize the most ardent Trump supporters are like a flock of chickens. Everyday the man arrives and feeds them what they want to hear.

How their problems are not their fault but a conspiracy by those different than them trying take away their rights.

How only he, with absolute power, can fix this and save them.

How everything he does, he does for them and not for his own personal enrichment.

They look forward to his arrival, feasting on the largesse of his benevolence, until the day he wrings the neck of one of them to satisfy some perceived offense.

And by the next day, they’ve forgotten all about the event.

They wait excitedly the next day and the next and the next, some fed, some killed, until everything has been taken away from them.

Too late the flock realizes they are now dependent on him to survive yet powerless to prevent his callous and unremittent control over their very lives.

That is the quintessential example of Trump Derangement Syndrome; willful ignorance in the face of reality.