Words, when used precisely, can be instruments of truth. When they are used carelessly—or maliciously—they become weapons. Much of today’s public discourse illustrates that danger. When language loses precision, emotion fills the void, and hatred follows close behind.
Take the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It’s not a medical term but a rhetorical one—an accusation that some despise Donald Trump so intensely they cannot think clearly about him or his policies. Yet to call this reaction a “syndrome” misses something deeper. What we’re witnessing isn’t clinical delusion—it’s hatred, and hatred, as history and theology both teach us, is a moral and spiritual sickness.
Every success of Mr. Trump—whether lowering inflation, enforcing immigration law as written, reducing gas prices, or fortifying security against drug cartels and theocratic terrorists—seems to invite not reasoned opposition but reflexive contempt. Critics too often respond not to what he does but to who he is. Even benign proposals that could serve the common good draw outrage simply because his name is attached. When disagreement turns into dehumanization, words no longer serve understanding; they serve destruction.
Bishop Robert Barron has observed that a large part of mental illness is spiritual in origin. C. S. Lewis made the same point decades earlier: that fear, shame, and pride—the foundations of sin—also underlie much of our hatred. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s senior devil reminds us that hatred “has its pleasures,” offering a warped relief from fear. Pride, “the complete anti‑God state of mind,” transforms rivals into enemies, breeding resentment and hostility until all sense of charity is lost.
This spiritual dimension of politics is ancient. Blaise Pascal wrote that we are born with “holes in our hearts” meant to be filled by God. When we fill them with lesser things—power, ideology, or anger—we invite not peace but pathology. Hatred masquerades as moral certainty; in reality, it is spiritual decay.
Sadly, accusing others of hatred while practicing it oneself has become a political tactic. Marxist and Alinskyite strategies deliberately divide—turning faction against faction, accusing opponents of the very sins one commits to sow confusion and fear. Lewis understood this impulse well. As a younger atheist scholar, he confessed to “my deep‑seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness.” Only when his heart turned Godward did that hatred begin to heal.
Labeling hatred as a “syndrome” or “delusion” may sound clinical, but it trivializes the moral truth. Hatred is not a diagnosis—it is a choice, one with devastating spiritual consequences. The only remedy for hatred is not more hatred but conversion: the courage to turn outward, toward truth, and upward, toward God.
If we wish to restore reason to politics, we must start by purifying the heart. Only then will our words regain their power—not to wound, but to heal.
