Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), and ideological patterns crossing new lines in atypical political activity
Trump Versus the Hive, Part 22
Trump Derangement Syndrome, markers of lost rationality, and the increases in political violence
Many who oppose Trump might casually tell you that, “yeah inflation and gas prices are not ideal”, and even “yeah nuclear war with Russia and China might be kind of bad”, but then they burst into rage when discussing Trump. In 2016, it was his collusion with Russia. In 2017, it was his Tweets and offensive comments. In 2020, it was that he led an “insurgency” and tried to “overturn the election”, a world away from the reality that he told people to march to the Capitol “peacefully”, and filed procedures to ensure states had time to ensure the count was correct. Since, 2023, it’s that he’s a “criminal” – with filing of charges timed perfectly to get convictions, but not appeals correcting legal errors, before the election.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome” (or “TDS”), refers to an atypical anger and a loss of rationality described by some as a pathological psychological breakdown response to Trump’s actions and presidency. It is behavior varied from historic norms, and involves divergence and rejection of longstanding values and norms.
As the magazine Psychology Today wrote in an article entitled, “Is "Trump Derangement Syndrome" a Real Mental Condition?” by Rob Whitley, Ph.D., describes, the phenomenon is, “Shared amongst these is a notion that the everyday activities of President Trump trigger some people into distorted opinions, extreme emotions and hysterical behaviors.”
Writer Bernard Goldberg gives supposed behavioral examples of TDS among Trump’s political opponents, including fainting, vomiting, students retreating to "safe spaces", and others demanding "therapy dogs."
While some people are obviously very disturbed by Trump’s speeches and actions, a key question may be, does the issue lie with Trump or with them. Or both. And if with them, what is this phenomenon?
Examples of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”:
· A sixth-grade girl at Samoset middle school was reportedly told by her teacher that she could not do a school report on the President of the United States as her hero.
· In many places in America, wearing a red hat that says “Make America Great Again” will get one attacked on the street.
· Visitors to Disneyland were told they could not wear a t-shirt that supports the then President of the United States.
· Students at UCLA were recently willing to sign a petition to put Trump supporters in concentration camps.
· Hampshire College in Massachusetts took down its American flag after students complained that it was a symbol of inequality after Trump won the election.
· Longtime-honored Democrat Harvard Professor and Lawyer Alan Dershowitz says he was shunned for his legal defense of Trump, even had his book banned from a book fair, and likened it to McCarthyism of the 1950’s.[1] For over 50 years, Harvard Law Professor Allan Dershowitz, a Democrat, was a trusted legal opinion by Democrats. In an instant, he became opposed by nearly the entire Left-leaning media, cancelled, ousted from social circles in Martha’s Vineyard for representing Trump during the impeachment, for holding the view that the Trump prosecutions are improper. 50 years of favorability erased, in an instant, across millions of minds. That is the power of ideology.
· For the first time in history, a draft Supreme Court opinion was leaked, apparently by a clerk, to the press.
· For the first time in history, a president’s (Trump’s) tax returns were leaked to the press by an IRS contractor.
We are seeing patterns of conduct we know to be irrational. The Left connects the dots on the Right, but what about connecting the dots on the Left?
And the irrationality escalates. How far? All the way. We should all be concerned about political violence. Threats against members of Congress have jumped 10-fold since 2016 to 9600. Threats to federal judges have also increased 400% to 4200.[2] Similar increases exist recently for state and local officials.
· A university professor reportedly purposely shot himself to protest Trump.
· Two lawyers were convicted of setting fire to a police car using a Molotov cocktail during the George Floyd riots.[3]
· On June 14, 2017, a “Left-wing activist” committed a mass shooting targeting Republicans at a Congressional baseball game, shooting six people including Republican Congressman Steve Scalise. According to the shooter’s attorney, he “never did anything violent”[4]
The issue is not which side the violence is on. The violence, while obviously terrible, is not the ultimate problem nor the cause. The violence is a symptom. Yelling about it, even prosecuting it, won’t help, same as a doctor focusing on just the symptom instead of the underlying disease won’t help.
It is a symptom of increasing ideological malignancy due to a deepening ideological divide.
But the demagogues on both sides fanning flames are also a symptom, of the strengthening ideologies going into defense mode, channeling power and attention to more outspoken and extreme personalities.
So now what?
Ideological patterns are crossing new lines in atypical political activity.
America is now witnessing atypical actions and statements showing a pattern of irrational and ideological influence even among the highest members of our government; a Supreme Court Justice, the Speaker of the House, and Senators included. These are the people most trusted to be loyal to the Constitution and rational, now escalating above preexisting norms.
If we wanted to map out this pattern, we might examine new legal and policy boundaries being violated. Perhaps, we ask:
“What patterns exist of Left adherents violating their own moral codes, rules, laws, pre-existing norms, boundaries, and rational judgment to advance their Left ideology?”
· Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg told the New York Times regarding Trump that, “I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president.” She later apologized, saying, “On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them.” “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”[5] Such comments, regardless, as the Washington Post explained, “the Code of Conduct for United States Judges flatly states that a ‘judge should not . . . publicly endorse or oppose a candidate for public office.’ Politicization, real or perceived, undermines public faith in the impartiality of the courts.”[6]
· In April of 2021, shortly after Biden was elected, Democrats introduced a bill to expand (“pack”) the Supreme Court from 9 justices to 13, because they currently lack the majority, despite that Justice Roberts often votes with liberal justices. There have been 9 justices in the Court since 1869, decided by presidential nominations. Packing the court would be changing a longstanding policy that maintained balance for over 150 years.
· In 2019, top Democratic senators introduced a bill to abolish the Electoral College, which has been used to choose American presidents as established by the founding fathers for over 200 years.
· Senator Chuck Schumer openly threatened two Supreme Court justices if they did not vote a certain way, saying, ‘I want to tell you Gorsuch, and I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwinds, and you will pay the price….you won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions”[7] Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments, and Senators have no lawful means of punishing justices for their legal opinions.
· Nancy Pelosi ripped up a state of President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union speech, emotionally unable to handle the President’s statements.
· Rep. Maxine Waters said, “If you see anybody from that cabinet, in a restaurant, in a department store, in a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd…” Now, this isn’t just telling people to confront Trump and his people’s policies or in the political arena, but to create a mob (which can not be controlled) to confront them physically.
· Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) allegedly pulled a fire alarm on Capitol Hill.
And this is a pattern we do not see on the Right, or from Trump, though a lot of his statements have been taken out of context to suggest he is calling for violence. Once the rules are out the window, there’s no limit to how far each side can counter-escalate. But the escalations are again a symptom.
These individuals lost rational perspective of the nation’s best interests to ideology because the image they have of Trump (not the actual Trump) overrode normal behavioral control and judgment.
This behavior was not a response to watching full Trump speeches and all his interviews. But rather, the media’s cherry-picked, most offensive five-second snippets of Trump statements, repeated over and over, with hours of emotionally-outraged one-sided commentary, combined with the social pressure of one’s entire hive feeling that same collective group outrage.
So yes, the biggest irony in our nation’s downward spiral of irrational escalation is that The Left demonizes Trump and his supporters for being divisive, when in reality the Left is being far more divisive.
Why?
Who is more divisive; Trump who says a few controversial statements in an hour-long speech that is otherwise positive and uplifting about improving America? Or, the Left media who cherry-picks just his most controversial statements, and repeats them thousands of times, with endless emotionalized angry opinion commentary (“analysis”) of how Trump and his supporters are effectively evil?
You can stigmatize an out-group for anything; supposedly being racist, or supporting a rapist, or being anti-human rights, or not believing in climate change, or having a disease, or not believing in science, or even being anti-kindness. The excuse doesn’t matter. What matters is the Left’s ideological entity’s emotional intensity of anger being increased towards an out-group. The “why” is secondary, mere confirmation bias. The why changes day to day, week to week with Trump. The energy escalating is the problem, and the increasing efforts to stop him are a result of that escalating desperation by the Left to stop him.
So in the most backwards of ironies, the Left ideology demagogues Trump and the Right for being “divisive” so much, cherry-picking his most-divisive ideas out of the context of all his positive ideas and actions, or open and fair debate, and repeating them thousands of times, that the Left adherents become the truly divisive and hateful ones.
It’s like actually beating up someone for having a reputation of violence, and not even realizing the irony.
With Left control of the media, Left adherents are responsible for the vast majority of demagoguery of the Right as the out-group, and much of the increasing hatred and division. It doesn’t matter what Trump does positive, the media will filter it out from the narrative, the way they filter out when he holds Black leadership conferences at the White House, but continually repeat the narrative that he is racist.
And it would be one thing if such manipulation remained in the political arena, but the heads of our law highest enforcement are mind slaves to the same Left media.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/07/03/alan-dershowitz-says-friends-on-marthas-vineyard-are-shunning-him-for-defending-trump/
[2] https://time.com/6227754/political-violence-us-states-midterms-2022/
[3] https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-sentences-second-new-york-lawyer-molotov-cocktail-case-2023-01-27/
Perhaps noteworthy, the two attorneys received sentences for throwing a firebomb in a police car of a year and a day and a fine for one, and 15 months for the other. I’m not defending or judging anyone, but compare this to January 6thdefendants, like Jacob Chansley, who wore the horned head-dress, was amicably led around by Capitol police and engaged in no violence, yet received a sentence of 3.5 years in prison. Others who were not even at the Capitol received more than 10 years.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting
[5] https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/07/14/ginsburg-on-trump-comments-i-m-sorry
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/justice-ginsburgs-inappropriate-comments-on-donald-trump/2016/07/12/981df404-4862-11e6-bdb9-701687974517_story.html