Our Trump Deranged World
The slur "Trump Derangement Syndrome" unintentionally captures something real about our world.
Our political discourse reflects our political culture, which in turn reflects our broader culture—which is just another way of saying it reflects the home in which we live. If there’s a pervasive problem in our political discourse, our house is not in order.
Bad political rhetoric is nothing new. It’s arguably part of the human condition. Aristotle, Cicero, the Framers, and George Orwell all warned about the dangers of sloppy, misleading, or demagogueish rhetoric. In the very last paragraph of The Federalist Papers, Hamilton cautioned against “the military despotism of a victorious demagogue.” If Hamilton could imagine this in the 18th century, then what we face today is far from unprecedented, at least as a concern. Still, even if the problem is perennial, the form and expression it takes changes with our institutions, technologies, and cultural habits.
The phrase that prompted me thinking about all of this is a regrettably all-too-familiar one: Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It’s everywhere. If you’re on any social media, it’s hard to go a day without coming across it. I’ve even heard it floated as if it were a real diagnosis, formally recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. (Cue the Arrested Development narrator: “It is not.”)
So here’s my confession: this phrase triggers me. Hugely. At times, I’m nearly as emotionally triggered by the phrase—especially when it’s lobbed at me or my friends or political allies—as I am by some of the deplorable actions taken by Trump himself. So much so that I am tempted to wonder if there’s a “Trump Derangement Syndrome Syndrome,” a condition for people triggered by the phrase.
Why does this phrase bother me so much? One possibility is the simplest: I suffer from TDS, and I have it bad. Maybe I do turn every molehill into a mountain. After all, the phrase does capture something real about the difficulty of staying level-headed in the Trump era—a difficulty I personally find exacting and exhausting. But before I stick with this self-diagnosis, let me make a case for why at first blush it’s simply a bad phrase.
Its purpose isn’t clarity but dismissal. It’s shorthand for:
- You’re irrational.
- You’ve lost your senses.
- I don’t need to refute your arguments, because they’re obviously flawed.
- In fact, I don’t even need to listen to you
It’s performative, not substantive. Like “Let’s Go, Brandon!” it says a lot without actually expressing what is intended to be conveyed. And what it ultimately says is: You and your words don’t count.
Here the work of philosopher Harry Frankfurt can shed light on this rhetorical turn. In his 2005 book On Bullshit, Frankfurt draws a helpfulful distinction between lying and bullshitting. A liar knows the truth and tries to conceal it. To paraphrase one of his own examples, if I say I have $100 in my wallet in my right pocket, when I know I don’t even have my empty wallet with me, I am lying. Bullshitting, Frankfurt argues, is different. For the bullshitter, facts (and the truth more generally) are irrelevant. The bullshitter’s concern is not accuracy but the effect of his bullshit on the audience. Liars intentionally deceive about the truth. Bullshitters don’t care whether what they say is true or false. Their only concern is their effect.
Trump, who I and others have called a con-artist, is a bullshitter without parallel in the modern era. When he claims to have had “the biggest electoral mandate in 129 years” or the best polling numbers of all time, he’s not lying in the traditional sense. He hasn’t checked the data; he doesn’t know or care. His aim is simply to score points and inflate his worth. The truth or falsity of the claim is irrelevant. If the facts help him, fine. If not, also fine.
Of course, Trump Derangement Syndrome is just one of many emotionally charged, rhetorically loaded bullshit expressions that saturate our political discourse. Left and right alike wield them. These shorthand terms (or tropes) don’t illuminate reality or advance discourse or deepen understanding; they signal team loyalty, score points, and shut down conversation. They’re rhetorical weapons, not tools of understanding.
Here are a few familiar examples:
- “The swamp.” Allegedly this term indicates the corruption in D.C. But Trump himself has flaunted corruption in the open, so it’s obvious that one person’s swamp is another person’s agenda at work.
- “The deep state.” Bureaucratic inertia is real, as is bureaucratic resistance to the will of elected officials, but this phrase is a vague catch-all for distrust of institutions, giving them a shadowy, X-Files conspiratorial quality.
- “Woke.” Originally this vaguely meant awareness of injustice. Now it’s a slur against diversity and inclusion—values that many people endorse but are here treated as sinister simply by labeling them as woke.
- “Fake news.” This is an oldie but goodie, effectively meaning simply “news that Trump doesn’t like.”
- “Snowflake.” This is my personally least favorite. Why? Because every morally sane person has feelings, and most everyone’s feelings can be fragile and hurt by others. Worse yet, from my perspective, it seems that the people who most often hurl this invective are comically un-self-aware of their own supreme delicacy. (Exhibit A: the outrage over Cracker Barrel’s rebranding.)
- “Globalists.” To whom does this refer? Often it points to people who favor free trade and the open exchange of ideas, but its connotation hints at elitists who favor one-world government. It’s intentionally open-ended.
There are, of course, other equally charged phrases, but what unites all these phrases (and others like them, whether invoked by the RIght or Left) is that they end rather than advance conversation. They don’t encourage nuance; they don’t try to shed light on complexity; they’re not attempts at bringing a topic closer to reality. They’re rhetorical bombs designed to derail rather than to reveal. They are effective bullshit. They score points without helping us better understand reality.
Which brings me back to Trump Derangement Syndrome. On one level, it’s classic Frankfurtian bullshit: dismissive shorthand meant to belittle. But on another level, it may unintentionally capture something real about our world. I think this is the reason, finally, I’m so triggered by its use as a slur.
Trump exerts an extraordinary gravitational pull on our political culture. Imagine a planet many times larger than Jupiter suddenly entering our solar system. Its gravitational force would be wildly disruptive. That, in effect, is President Trump. He is the newly inserted mega-planet of our political solar system, with a far greater reach on our thoughts and actions than Putin, Musk, Xi Jinping, or (dare I say) Taylor Swift. Through relentless ambition, a towering ego, shameless self-promotion, and the destruction of virtually every traditional norm of discourse, he has hoisted himself into becoming the central figure around whom everything orbits. This is not accidental. He wants his name and face on buildings, universities, and museums. He wants his taste in music memorialized and honored. He wants the world and our thoughts remade in his image.
And beyond all predictions, he has largely succeeded. Both supporters and opponents are caught in the gravitational pull of his orbit. His supporters adore him, excuse anything, and cheer him on at his rallies like the groupies that they are. His opponents struggle to maintain hope in a normal future.
There is a disturbance in the Force, and that disturbance is Trump’s gargantuan ego and personality.
Supporters and opponents alike–we all think about Trump. Every day. Whether we love him or hate him, he lives rent-free in all of our heads. In that sense, the entire country—and arguably the world—suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a sign of an individual’s pathology, it’s a sign of a very real change in the world.
The consequences of this oversized gravitational pull will be measured for decades. But one of its most immediate and obvious effects is the explosion of rhetorical bullshit in our discourse. My every instinct suggests the distribution of bullshit tilts heavily to the right, but I can’t pretend it isn’t prevalent everywhere. When politics feels existential, truth takes a backseat to team loyalty. A measured fidelity to facts wherever they may fall seems like a luxury—or worse, a betrayal.
Neither our own political system nor, frankly, any decent political system ought to orbit around one man. The Framers deliberately built checks and balances to prevent concentration of power. Even Abraham Lincoln, in the depths of the Civil War—the moment we came closest to dictatorship, no matter how justified—said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
Lincoln recognized he was not the center of the universe–both in fact and in aspiration. Trump, by contrast, demands to be. And when a political culture bends around one man, the result is not just bad policy or bad governance. In fact, it’s bullshit.
This will in no way assuage your anxiety but it has long been my opinion that TDS is supporting a sexual assault-ist and convicted fraud and yet still thinking that you’re some kind of patriot. As with everything MAGA it is 100% projection.
Understanding could lead to empathy. Empathy could lead to questioning one’s priors. Questioning one’s priors could lead to doubt about whether the Them is an existential threat to your way of life. Without the threat, it becomes much harder to justify accepting a dictatorship in coalition with white supremacists.
I don’t believe TDS is about saying your words don’t matter. It’s not about you.
Rather, avoiding understanding is psychic self-defense.
A lot of people forget that the “X Derangement Syndrome” business didn’t start with Trump–it started with Dubya, with the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” coined by none other than the late psychiatrist-turned-GOP-hack Charles Krauthammer, who probably more than any other pundit post-Goldwater-rule was constantly trying to pathologize the other side.
In fairness, it’s worth noting that over the years I have occasionally heard Dems use terms like “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” and “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” Just not anywhere near as often as Republicans have used it to discredit criticisms of the presidents or candidates they support.
Whoever uses it, it is at bottom an attempt to shut down conversation. When someone accuses you of being deranged, they aren’t just disagreeing, they’re implying you’re not even worthy of being listened to. No one gives a moment to the ranters on the New York subway, or the people in padded cells.
It also is a way of automatically equating passionate opposition with derangement. It’s part of a propaganda technique of referencing a popular stereotype to construct a preferred narrative, without having to prove anything. Think Trump is destroying American democracy? That’s what they always say when a Republican is in office. Don’t listen to them, they’re just hysterical. (It’s striking how closely this type of rhetoric resembles gender dynamics, particularly the practice of dismissing women’s opinions by suggesting they’re over-emotional and hysterical. Look up the root of the word hysteria to get an idea how ingrained this way of thinking is in our language.) Of course MAGA never sees its own rhetoric in this light; to them everything that they believe makes perfect sense, and it’s only the other side that’s “crazy,” by saying men are women, or promoting “conspiracy theories” like Russian collusion. It’s easy to fall for strawmen when you’re convinced at the start that the people you oppose aren’t worth even listening to. It’s also what helps breed projection and hypocrisy: I like to compare it to a man arrested for going around stabbing people, and when asked why he did it, he says he was trying to get rid of serial killers in the neighborhood. That’s MAGA in a nutshell.
It doesn’t anger or trigger me when someone labels me a TDS sufferer, because the only ones who do so are ignoramuses.
Jews. Every shady group of “others” who control things is Jews. Lizard people, the IMF*, the Deep State, bankers, Wall Street, AIPAC**, globalists, Hollywood, the Elite, the Ivory Tower… they’re all Jews. Whether the call is coming from the left or the right, it’s always Moderates too, they just say less.
And most of the time when the anonymous “they” is referenced (“they raised prices again”), it’s Jews.
The international pedophile ring that Donald J. Trump is fighting — the pedophikes who are killing the children and harvesting the adrenochome — they’re Jews and it’s just the same old blood libel. (I’m not angry with QAnon for just being antisemites, but I am disappointed)
It’s always Jews.
Anyway, hope that helps!
(I would make an exception for “They say you shouldn’t go swimming for half an hour after eating”, but they are probably Jewish doctors.)
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* one of the Mission Impossible movies ends(?) with Tom Cruise telling his love-interest that he works for the IMF. There is no world in which I will hear that as anything other than the International Monetary Fund. Impossible Mission Force, my ass.
**: There are a lot of Jews in AIPAC.
If you don’t suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, I question your pattern recognition. Or your morals.
If someone shows themselves to be either incompetent, evil, or both, and shows this over and over… a reasonable person does not carefully consider each insane uttering on its own and weigh it on its merits.
@Gustopher:
They’re not even being all that oblique about it these days. Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly (among others) have recently been floating the claim that Epstein was a Mossad agent controlling US policy.
(Of course, my use of this example is the sort of thing that invariably provokes cries of “Criticizing the Israeli government is not the same as anti-Semitism!”–a mantra that ends up being used to suggest that no criticisms of Israel can be anti-Semitic. So the old white-supremacist term ZOG isn’t anti-Semitic; they didn’t say JOG! But I digress…)
While I agree about there being a conspiratorial they which often bleeds into anti-Semitism, it’s part of a larger use of the pronoun to imply opposition to an unnamed mass of people. It’s not always conspiratorial, but it is always lazy. The classic phrase for the conspiracy crowd is “That’s what they want you to think.” The classic phrase for the lazy crowd is “They said it couldn’t be done.”
You kind of get both versions during the ending to Falling Down.
William “D-Fens” Foster: I’m the bad guy?
Sgt. Prendergast: Yeah.
William “D-Fens” Foster: How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I helped to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. Instead they give it to the plastic surgeons, y’know. They lied to me.
Sgt. Prendergast: Is that what this is about? You’re angry because you got lied to? Is that why my chicken dinner is drying out in the oven? Hey, they lie to everyone. They lie to the fish. But that doesn’t give you any special right to do what you did today.
TDS,
I’m partial to the “ Trump’s Delusion Syndrome” usage.
Using TDS in actual conversation is just as disqualifying as using the term “cancel culture” – or “PC culture.” [It’s not PC culture, it’s culture. It’s not cancel culture, it’s culture…. and in all cases, it shows the person using it is unable to deal with people.]
It’s not “Trump derangement syndrome,” it’s “disagreement.”
This is exactly the same as one of the more recent tacks of calling anyone disagreeing with Trump “mentally ill” — because as always, Republicans are snowflakes who can’t defend any policy on the merits and have no other responses than pivoting to attacking the messenger.
As well, to Republicans, of course daddy [any R leader] must be always deferred to, so there’s no questioning the policy.
@Kylopod:
It’s used on the left as well. Anti-Zionism* and antisemitism don’t walk hand in hand, but they have a lot of the same friends.
A decade ago, we could rely on the ADL to help keep track of who was which, but they’ve become pro-Zionist and are trying to blur the line between them to discredit anti-Zionism. When is a Nazi salute not a Nazi salute? When upsetting the President’s friends and thus the President can have negative foreign policy implications with regards to Israel.
And that means antisemites are more welcome in anti-Zionist spaces, because you can’t immediately identify them. Everyone is called an antisemite, after all. And antisemitism breeds when it’s let in — not quite as quickly as hatred of trans folks**, but it does damage with people who are already outraged and who can have that outrage redirected.
I think the SPLC is still decent, but I haven’t actually checked recently.
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*: I could support a Jewish state if the Palestinians also have freedom. Two state solution, resettling the Jewish state to a spare Dakota***, some wacky overlapping state concept, whatever. Not quite anti-Zionism. But let’s round all of that into anti-Zionism for simplicity.
**: transphobia, and all the various -phobias in general, is a necessary precursor to hatred and bigotry, but aren’t the same and don’t need to lead there. People should be allowed to be uncomfortable. There’s a whole lot of “I don’t like ‘em, but they should get to live their lives” out there.
I think not making that distinction is as harmful to the queer community as treating anti-Zionism the same as antisemitism hurts the Jewish community.
***: we can move some top soil to move the Holy Land. It’s at least as reasonable as the wire around Manhattan.
If so, it wasn’t inevitable. There’s nothing about Trump that made him a force of nature disrupting America’s politics. It was a choice, made by people who talk about politics, such as journalists, bloggers, social media users, talkback radio hosts and their callers, podcast hosts. Most of the attention Trump gets is not for things he’s done, but for things he’s said. He gets massive daily news coverage just by posting bullshit on social media or more recently, signing fatuous “executive orders”.
Consider some of the recent bullshit he’s posted about. Naming a football team. The logo of a restaurant chain. The sweetener in Coca-Cola. A contractor scratching the new limestone in the White House gardens. His failure to get a Nobel Peace Prize. Various supposedly terrible TV networks and their hosts. Rosie O’Donnell. It’s the essence of trivial bullshit. But millions of Americans choose to treat it as if it were newsworthy, discussing its implications as if they were important. Even the torrent of mockery it gets serves Trump’s purpose, reassuring him that everyone is paying attention to him, crowding out any other news that might help his “enemies” (who are legion).
But I repeat, this is a choice. A very irrational one. The rational choice would be to ignore the bullshit. The rational choice would be to focus on what he and his government have done, which on balance has been very bad for America and Americans. But that reality gets buried in all the bullshit so nothing ends up mattering. Trump meaningless lying that he’s ended an ever-increasing number of wars gets the same coverage as his repeated blundering interferences in real wars that show no sign of ending any time soon.
There are many faults to find in the Democratic Party and on the American left in general, but they are not ultimately to blame for Trump. The guilty parties are what are sometimes called the “chattering classes”. Trump proclaimed he was a BFD, so they made him one.
It ay be El Taco duffers from a unique mix of narcissism, solipsism, delusion, dementia, mental atrophy, and who knows what all else, which would require psychiatry to come up with a new diagnosis for his condition.
They could do worse than call it trump derangement syndrome.
It’s one of the gifts of the erosion of democracy that we got from the “War” on terror. Charles Krauthammer came up with Bush Derangement Syndrome, abusing his former status as a psychiatrist to pretend Bush critics had a mental condition he was diagnosing rather than legitimate complaints against Bush’s torture regime, illegal war, warrantless surveillance and general all-around malfeasance. So for me I’m particularly annoyed by TDS because it flashes me back to 2003 and how horrible things were then.
@Gustopher:
It’s used predominantly on the left. On the right, it’s only when you shift away from the dominant evangelical “Christian Zionist” bloc and toward the more-fringe-but-increasingly-influential Nazi-adjacent crowd that you encounter Israel-bashing in right-wing circles. Neither crowd likes Jews, but the Christian Zionists at least pretend to.
This is not as new as you are suggesting. Remember how they joined the chorus against the Cordoba Initiative (the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”) back in 2010? I had hoped the replacement of Abe Foxman with Jason Greenblatt would make them a bit more enlightened. Part of the problem is that Oct. 7 seems to have scrambled many of the old alliances, but the larger picture is that they’ve become part of the anticipatory obedience since Trump’s return. It wasn’t that long ago that Elon Musk was threatening to sue them for pointing out (as many other organizations did) the rise in hate speech on Twitter since Musk’s takeover. Their response seems to be, well, no hard feelings, because at least we’re on the same side in opposing the Ay-rabs.
Whippersnappers!
Bill and Hillary had the mantle for derangement syndrome back in the day. Hill was so right about the “vast right wing conspiracy”. She took a real beating for stating that truth.
Poor Vince Foster. He wasn’t made to withstand the ugly lies and smears that the GOP and their malevolent minions were so eager to heap on him and those he cared about. CDS killed him.
First, kudos to Michael Bailey for a well crafted essay! And kudos to Ken_L for observing that Trump’s bullshit is avidly consumed and regurgitated by people who should know better. Eg., the copying and pasting of his Truth Social crap by mainstream media and bloggers alike. Yes, we should know what the POTUS is thinking, but this guy?? PT Barnum and Himmler are laughing in hell. In my estimation, TDS was co-opted by Trump’s fans to use against critics. Trump Derangement = thinking it’s a good thing that a malignant narcissist and uber-bullshitter is president of the USA. {And noting the difference between bullshit and a lie is powerful and true. The quintessential bullshit in campaign 2024 was the cats and dogs disappearing in Springfield, OH. JD Dunce admitted it was bullshit – that he didn’t care if it was true – he wanted to steer the media and he did.}