DAVID MARCUS: Trump Derangement Syndrome isn't mental illness, it's mass hysteria
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. raised some eyebrows last week by telling podcaster Adam Corolla that not only is Trump Derangement Syndrome a real thing, but that he has considered officially giving it an ICD (International Classification of Diseases) code.
While the secretary's remark may have been somewhat in jest (he was responding to a joke about a hypothetical TDS vaccine), he has been clear that the phenomenon that has torn apart so many Americans is indeed happening, including in his own family.
And it isn’t just Kennedy sounding the alarm. Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert argues that Trump Derangement Syndrome is not only genuine, but that it infects 75% of his liberal Manhattanite patients.
"This is a profound pathology, and I would even go so far to call it the defining pathology of our time," Alpert told Fox News Digital last year.
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"It doesn't take long for me to pick up on this: people are obsessed with Trump, they’re fixated, they’re hyper-fixated on Trump," he continued. "And they talk about some of the features of this disorder — they can’t sleep, they feel traumatized by Mr. Trump, they feel restless."
Kennedy and Alpert are completely correct that TDS is a genuine phenomenon, but they are wrong to think of it as a mental disorder that operates primarily on the individual level. What we are witnessing is actually classic mass hysteria.
This is an important distinction, because one cannot simply treat an individual for TDS, as Corolla joked, with a vaccine or even therapy. No, the entire system that is encouraging the social contagion has to be addressed, not unlike the trans issue.
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In the case of both TDS and trans identity, outside elements are not just influencing the behavior, they are constantly reinforcing it; it doesn’t primarily exist inside the individual, but rather everywhere outside the individual.
There are four basic hallmarks of people affected by mass hysteria. See if any of these seem familiar to you:
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It is perfectly obvious that irrational fear of Donald Trump and his presidency has been fueled by a hysterical media, not just in the news game. On late night TV, The View and even many sports programs, the external message to those suffering from TDS is that Trump is everywhere and in everything.
Trump has been turned into a bogeyman, a term which in fact comes from stories that were told to scare British children of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the original ‘boneyman."
But this time, centuries later, it is not kids who are terrified, but grown adults. They view the threat of Trump as so existential, so primal, that it forces them to cut ties with loved ones who are aligned with the supposed threat of Trump.
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All of this is then further normalized by think pieces, advice columns and Tik Tok videos urging people to cut ties with their MAGA relations. It is often presented as a moral duty.
If we are going to tackle TDS, and we should, it will not be with injections or sessions lying on couches, but rather by addressing the media that has been inventing and feeding the hysteria for over a decade now.
Mass hysteria has a long history, from the dancing sickness of the 16th century to the Salem Witch Trials. But never have the conditions been better for mass hysteria to spread far and wide, fed to us by the social media algorithm.
Sadly, we seem a long way from fixing the mass media root problems of Trump Derangement Syndrome, with its constant claims that Trump is bringing back Jim Crow and the Confederacy, or that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are his own personal gestapo.
So long as the media and the Democrats continue to treat every single thing that Trump does as the end of democracy, Trump Derangement Syndrome will be with us, and more relationships will be sundered.
Thus far, in history, all known cases of mass hysteria eventually ran their course and ended, and eventually TDS will, as well. But that will happen a lot faster if the media and those in power on the left can diagnose and cure their own hysteria first.