Varieties of Trump Derangement Syndrome

One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.

And this, in fact, is why I mention James’s interesting book. It is not only religion that admits to a wide variety of expressions. That may be said of many other passions. Consider, for example, the passion denominated “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” commonly abbreviated TDS. The malady is akin to, though much more dangerous than, Bush Derangement Syndrome, first identified and catalogued by the late, great Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer defined BDS 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.” As to the nature of the disease, Krauthammer speculated that its etiology might be some sort of “virus” whose effects threatened to become “epidemic” among susceptible populations (in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for example).

Although its distempers seemed aggravated at the time, we may now look back on the era of George W. Bush as a time of relative comity. That is because the advent of Trump Derangement Syndrome pumped the whole phenomenon full of steroids and turned the volume up to—well, I was going to say “to 11,” but it is much worse than that.

The attention needed to sustain a state of emergency is difficult to maintain, and it has been my observation that the true insanity of TDS has faded from the public consciousness—always assuming that its recognition was ever widely appreciated. An analysis and history of the phenomenon forms a leitmotif in Victor David Hanson’s excellent new book The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.