TDS

Another long one.

On Friday I published a blog post about how contemporary politics increasingly substitutes tribal instinct for evidence and law. About how identity and allegiance are used to smother uncertainty and rush to moral closure. What follows is a continuation of that argument, because the pattern is no longer anecdotal. It is structural. And it needs names.

In the United States, the syndrome is now clear enough to label. Trump Defence Syndrome.

Trump Defence Syndrome is not about liking Donald Trump, voting for him, or agreeing with his policies. It is about reflexive protection. An automatic closing of ranks whenever an event threatens the moral authority of Trump, his movement, or institutions acting under his banner. The conclusion is fixed in advance. Everything else is arranged around it.

The defining feature of Trump Defence Syndrome is not passion or conviction. It is the loss of falsifiability. Evidence no longer has the power to disconfirm the preferred conclusion. Timing is dismissed as pedantry. Context is waved away as bias. Legal standards are reduced to slogans. Any demand for precision is treated as hostility. Accountability itself is reframed as sabotage.

You see it in the language. Assertions replace evidence. “He felt threatened.” “They were warned.” “She knew what she was doing.” Each is delivered as if it settles the matter, even when none of it is demonstrable. Proof is not the point. Stabilising the outcome is.

Trump Defence Syndrome also has a hierarchy of credibility. Authority figures aligned with the movement are assumed truthful by default. Independent investigators are suspect. Journalists are enemies. Courts are tolerated only when they confirm the preferred narrative. When they do not, they too are corrupt. This is not scepticism. It is selective faith.

And that word matters. Psychologically, this is no longer ordinary political belief. It occupies the same mental territory as belief systems that predate modern evidential reasoning. Early Christianity under persecution is the closest analogue. Belief came first. Reality was reinterpreted to fit it. External criticism became proof of righteousness. Internal doubt became heresy. Truth was revealed, not tested.

This distinction matters, because not all political conviction works this way. The difference is not strength of belief, but whether belief remains answerable to outcomes. In evidence-based politics, failure forces revision. Under Trump Defence Syndrome, failure forces scapegoating.

This also explains the tight fusion of conservative politics and Christianity in the United States. Not as theology, but as infrastructure. Christianity supplies moral absolutism, persecution narratives, and a language that converts power into righteousness. Trump did not bring Christianity to American conservatism. He instrumentalised an already hollowed shell.

Figures like Charlie Kirk make this explicit. Their role is not to argue policy, but to catechise. Politics becomes spiritual warfare. Opponents are not wrong, they are evil. Institutions are not flawed, they are captured. Once that move is made, analytical reasoning is replaced by faith-based cognition.

The UK now has its own parallel.

Farage Defence Syndrome follows the same psychological pattern, adapted to British conditions. It is not about policy, because policy is never the point. It is about identity, grievance, and the protection of a symbolic figure who defines himself against institutions, expertise, and constraint.

Under Farage Defence Syndrome, Brexit cannot fail. It can only be betrayed. When the UK struggles, the cause is global forces. When an EU country struggles, it is proof of collapse. These contradictions are not resolved because they are not analysed. They are inhabited.

Responsibility is endlessly deferred. If outcomes disappoint, it is because the courts interfered, civil servants obstructed, journalists lied, or politicians lacked courage. Nigel Farage is somehow powerful enough to be prophetic, but never powerful enough to be accountable.

The claim that Farage Defence Syndrome is “not about policy” is not abstract. It is demonstrable.

Farage’s current economic offer includes tens of billions of pounds of unfunded tax cuts, presented as cost-free or self-financing. There is no credible funding mechanism, no independent verification, and no serious engagement with fiscal rules or bond market reaction. When this is raised, supporters do not argue the numbers. They deny the relevance of numbers altogether.

This is where the Truss episode matters. The UK has already run a live experiment in unfunded tax cuts detached from fiscal reality. The result was immediate market panic, a collapse in sterling, soaring gilt yields, and emergency intervention by the Bank of England. This is not theory. It is recent history.

And yet under Farage Defence Syndrome, that causal chain simply does not register. Supporters insist “it would be different”, without specifying how. They dismiss bond markets as conspiracies, institutions as rigged, and economic constraints as optional. The link between policy and consequence is invisible to them, not because it is complex, but because acknowledging it would threaten the identity narrative.

This is the diagnostic point. When a movement cannot learn from its own recent failures, and cannot connect policy to outcome, it has crossed from politics into belief.

What Farage Defence Syndrome lacks, compared to its American cousin, is religious infrastructure. Which is why we now see attempts to import it.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s flirtation with Christianity is cynical, not devotional. It is a strategy, not a belief. A deliberate attempt to graft American culture-war religion onto British grievance politics, because Christianity supplies something populism needs once it moves beyond nationalism alone: moral elevation.

Stripped of theology and ethics, Christianity becomes branding. Cultural anxiety is recoded as civilisational struggle. Immigration becomes spiritual invasion. Opponents become evil rather than mistaken. Compromise becomes sin. Law becomes obstruction.

In both Trump Defence Syndrome and Farage Defence Syndrome, the tell is the same. Ask for detail and you are accused of bad faith. Ask for evidence and you are told to stop nitpicking. Ask “how exactly would this work?” and identity closes ranks. The argument ends.

The obvious response is inoculation. Slow, unglamorous, and deeply unfashionable. Institutions that behave predictably. Decisions explained plainly. Policy tied relentlessly to outcome. Boring competence elevated over charismatic certainty. The aim is not to defeat faith based politics in open combat, but to deny it oxygen by making evidence based governance feel normal, legible, and psychologically safer than belief.

But inoculation only goes so far. The harder truth is acceptance. Some movements cannot be reasoned with, only broken by experience. Faith based politics survives argument because argument can always be dismissed as bias or persecution. Reality, eventually, cannot. When failure becomes personal, immediate, and undeniable, belief systems fracture under their own weight. Lived experience is the one authority they cannot indefinitely dismiss.

History offers a bleak warning here. Those who do not learn from it are condemned to repeat it, and those who do often learn only after paying the price. Traditionally, the escape route has been lack of accountability. The demagogue departs untouched, blame is displaced, and the belief survives intact. Accountability removes that figleaf. When the figure who sold the certainty is visibly responsible for the damage, and cannot plausibly evade consequence, the narrative collapses. Acceptance only teaches the lesson it promises if failure is owned, traced, and attributed. Without that, suffering is real, but learning remains optional.

That is what Trump Defence Syndrome looks like. That is what Farage Defence Syndrome looks like. And once politics reaches this stage, it stops being about governing altogether, and becomes a permanent exercise in belief maintenance.