Unpacking Trump Derangement Syndrome: Are You Sure You Don’t Have It?

I write these op-eds. I follow the news — print, cable, the whole circuit. I can say from direct observation that Trump’s detractors have completely come unhinged.

The guests on Atlantic roundtables, the PBS NewsHour analysts, the MSNBC regulars — the most pompous, credentialed, perfectly behaved representatives of the educated establishment — are displaying the worst cases of TDS. The people who built careers on measured tone and rigorous argument have abandoned both. The composure is gone. The analysis is gone. What’s left is raw, escalating desperation and barely contained hysteria dressed up in the vocabulary of seriousness.

Make the bad man stop!

I’ve released a copy of their new reporting manual: The Modern Journalist’s Field Manual.

Substack and Twitter are worse. At least the cable guests have a producer in their ear. Online there’s no check at all. The posts get more unhinged by the week.

If this goes on much longer we’re going to be watching some of these people in padded rooms from behind a pane of glass.

The Europeans and elected Democratic party representatives have a stage 3 case.

So let’s unpack TDS — what it actually is and how you get it.

The Childhood Wiring

From the time you were old enough to sit in a circle at school, civilization installed specific rules in your nervous system. Don’t taunt. Don’t lie. Don’t call people names. Play fair. If you break these rules, there are consequences.

That conditioning isn’t superficial. It goes so deep it becomes nearly neurological. It isn’t a political preference. It’s closer to a reflex.

Now take that wiring and expose it to a man who taunts, lies, calls people names, plays by his own, different rules, tells a different version of the story every day — and faces no consequences. Who gets rewarded for it. Who gets cheered for it. Who is in charge of the largest economy and military in the world. You have to even kiss the ring to be a reporter if you want an interview or if you are a NATO member and want to be protected from Russia.

The picture that creates is one the normally socialized adult brain literally cannot integrate. The cognitive dissonance between what you were trained reality looks like and what you’re actually seeing is irresolvable through normal processing.

So the system overloads.

The result is TDS.

The Flooding

It’s not just the behavior. It’s the volume.

Any single taunt can be absorbed. Any single lie can be fact-checked and dismissed. But the relentlessness — the daily torrent of nicknames, provocations, norm violations, outrageous statements — overwhelms the processing system entirely.

There’s a name for the deliberate version of this. Firehose of falsehood. Identified as a Russian information warfare technique. Don’t make one persuasive argument. Flood the zone until your opponent can’t establish stable ground to push back from.

Trump added something the Russians didn’t have. The childlike affect. The taunting and name calling and obvious absurdity makes it impossible to calibrate a response. If a sophisticated adult lies to you, you marshal sophisticated counter-arguments. If someone taunts you with playground nicknames from the most powerful office on earth, you have no dignified response available. The mismatch short circuits adult response systems completely.

The reflex reaction of reporters is to repeat what he says over and over again in an attempt to challenge it all but it just makes people hear it more and increases the contagion.

The Brazilian Jiu Jitsu of TDS

Many people watch Mixed Martial Arts (Cage Fighting) A core component is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu — a complex form of submission wrestling. Its secret is counterintuitive.

The normal human reaction to many situations in a fight is instinctive but wrong. And wrong in a predictable way that can be exploited. If someone is on top of you, the reflex is to push them away by pushing up. Do that and you’ll get arm barred. Your instinct in the hands of a trained combatant defeats you.

Advanced BJJ practitioners don’t just defend against these reactions. They study them. They learn exactly what an untrained person will instinctively do in every position and develop counters. Then they bait those reactions deliberately. They create the situation that triggers the wrong reflex and wait for their opponent to do the work for them.

Famous champion Saulo Ribeiro teaches: don’t fight against them, see what they will give you.

Trump is doing this to his opponents and they have no idea.

Every taunt is a setup. Every norm violation is bait. The instinctive response — outrage, fact-checking, horrified op-eds, breathless coverage — is the political equivalent of pushing up against the person on top of you. It feels right. It’s what any normally socialized person would do. And it makes things worse every single time.

He has spent a lifetime learning what the instinctive responses are. He knows exactly which moves create which reactions. He creates the position, waits for the reflex, and applies the submission.

His opponents keep tapping out and lining up to go again.

People not used to fighting also don’t know about managing adrenaline in a fight. They start brawling and expending energy in an undisciplined way. This burns through your gas tank fast. You come in hot, throwing everything, and thirty seconds later you’re done — exhausted, exposed, making mistakes you’d never make fresh.

That’s where Trump’s opponents are now. The posts get wilder, the claims more unhinged, the outrage more desperate — not because things are getting worse but because they’re exhausted and can’t stop swinging. They are gassing. And he’s barely broken a sweat.

The Polite Language Version of Trump

Look carefully at what the most vocal Trump critics are actually doing now.

They are lying, calling names, and taunting. Just in a different language. The vocabulary is elevated, the tone is pained and serious, the sentences are grammatically correct. But strip that away and it’s the same schoolyard mechanics. The same bad faith. The same goal — humiliate, delegitimize, wound.

They think the blazer makes it different. It doesn’t.

They’re doing Trump in a blazer.

The credentialed class lacks humility and can’t admit they are falling for simple schoolyard tactics after having spent so much money on their fancy degrees. It can’t be that they are not as smart as they think they are.

The Crowd Is Loving It

There’s another dimension to this that I covered in an earlier piece — If You Can Understand Pro Wrestling, You Can Understand Trumpism.

In professional wrestling, “heat” is what the villain draws from the crowd — the boos, the jeers, the outrage. The more heat, the better the show. Trump’s fans don’t just like him because of what he says or does. They like that it makes the credentialed class squirm. Every unglued Atlantic contributor, every trembling PBS analyst, every horrified EU foreign minister is proof that the punch landed.

The credentialed establishment coming unglued isn’t a side effect. It’s the product. The show they paid to see. And every time a Harvard-educated commentator loses their composure on television, the crowd pops. Trump doesn’t even have to be in the room. His opponents are generating the heat for him.

That’s the trap in its final form. They think they’re fighting back. They’re performing for his audience.

The Question

Can you filter out the schoolyard antics and respond in a logical measured way, using exactly as much energy as is needed?

If you can’t hear from or about Trump without first becoming livid and then frothing at the mouth, you most likely have a case of TDS.