Two days after Christmas, I was diagnosed with the dreaded Trump Derangement Syndrome in a letter to this paper. The writer noted, “Us Trump supporters are perhaps the only group of voters in this nation’s history who have been so viciously and constantly maligned and in such a coordinated manner.”
Earlier this month in an April 17 email, I received an even worse diagnosis. The writer said that I “apparently” suffered “from Stage 4 Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).”
“Stage 4” catches your attention when you are a cancer survivor as I am. It is the last stage before there are no more stages. In the political world, because of social distancing, Donald Trump has been kept off his Red State stages where he loves to perform his signature campaign rallies. So he turned his daily White House coronavirus briefings into a kind of special spinoff of the familiar Trump rally — replete with the usual misinformation, self-promotion and insults. Brief, they are not, but Trump is very effective in getting his all-important high TV ratings. At the same time, he set a new standard for social distancing. He’s driving millions of people to turn off the coronavirus fake news briefings after Dr. Anthony Fauci stopped telling it like it is and his boss took over the podium.
Aides and allies have made concerted efforts to get Trump to stop doing daily briefings after calls made to poison control centers in at least four states spiked for several days in response to Trump’s suggestion that injecting disinfectant products should be looked into as a method to treat coronavirus patients. Not good for his falling poll numbers, especially after the president’s enthusiastic endorsement of the drug hydroxychloroquine that he said showed “tremendous promise” for curing coronavirus. Dr. Fauci once again had to countermand his boss by noting that there were no clinical trials that verified the safety and effectiveness of the drug.
Like growing millions of Americans who are not sick from COVID-19, but from Trump’s setting new standards for derangement, I determined to discover what Trump Derangement Syndrome actually means. And where it came from.
I began with the word “derangement.” One dictionary definition is “the state of being completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way, especially because of mental illness.”
Trump Derangement Syndrome has been used by Trump supporters to discredit criticism of his actions, as a way of reframing the discussion by suggesting that his opponents are incapable of accurately perceiving the world.
The origin of the term has been traced back to political columnist and conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist, who originally coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome” in 2003 during W’s presidency. “Syndrome” was defined by Krauthammer as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.”
I’m starting to see a pattern here.
The first use of the TDS term may have been by Esther Goldberg in an August 2015 op-ed in The American Spectator; she applied the term to ‘Ruling Class Republicans’ who were dismissive or contemptuous of Trump.
Krauthammer, in an op-ed harshly criticizing Trump, commented that — in addition to general hysteria about Trump — the ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ was the ‘inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and … signs of psychic pathology’ in his behavior.
What?! TDS was originally directed toward those who used to be moderate Republicans and toward Trump himself? By avowed Republican conservatives? I think I am beginning to be OK with my Stage 4 TDS diagnosis.
Looking elsewhere, I found that CNN’s editor-at-large Chris Cillizza called TDS “the preferred nomenclature of Trump defenders who view those who oppose him and his policies as nothing more than the blind hatred of those who preach tolerance and free speech.” Pointing to previous allegations of Bush Derangement Syndrome and Obama Derangement Syndrome, Cillizza suggested, “Viewed more broadly, the rise of presidential derangement syndromes is a function of increased polarization… in the country today.”
However, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson of Annenberg Public Policy Center, the TDS term could backfire on Trump supporters because people might interpret it to mean that Trump is the one who is “deranged,” rather than those who criticize him.
Yes! Yes! As Professor Henry Higgins says excitedly in the musical My Fair Lady when Eliza Doolittle finally achieves the ability to speak “proper” English, “I think she’s got it! I think she’s got it!”
John Bos lives in Shelburne Falls and deeply despairs the deranged defense of the Donald. As always, comments are invited at john01370@gmail.com.