Anyone who keeps an eye on US political discourse these days will be familiar with the epithet TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, a term routinely used to describe the irrationality of President Donald Trump’s critics. The term frequently crops up in editorial writing, comment threads, social-media debates, and ordinary conversation: “Clearly suffering from TDS”; “Another victim of TDS”; “Typical TDS symptoms,” and so on. The implication is that the critic in question is afflicted by a pathology that makes objective analysis of Trump and his policies impossible.

The origins of the TDS accusation date back to what now seem like the placid years of the George W. Bush presidency. In a scathing 2003 article about Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean for the Washington Post, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: “A plague is abroad in the land. Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.” This virus, Krauthammer continued, “is spreading. It is, of course, epidemic in New York’s Upper West Side and the tonier parts of Los Angeles, where the very sight of the president … caused dozens of cases of apoplexy in otherwise healthy adults.”

Bush, of course, was widely (and wildly) vilified in those days. A cottage industry of books, articles, and punditry condemned his invasion of Iraq, his stewardship of the US economy, his response to the flooding of New Orleans, his deference to Machiavellian subordinates like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his shadowy ties to American and Saudi oil interests. Popular documentaries included Michael Moore’s 2004 polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 and even a 2006 “mockumentary” titled Death of a President, about Bush’s fictionalised assassination. By the end of his second term, a Gallup poll found that Bush’s approval rating had slumped to a lowly 25 percent. Bush Derangement Syndrome, it seemed, was highly contagious.

In a September 2015 article, Krauthammer’s semi-satirical diagnosis was adapted by his Post colleagues Norman Leahy and Paul Goldman to describe overwrought reactions to Trump’s upstart presidential campaign. The following year, the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” appeared in the headline of an article by Charles Hurt in the Washington Times. The term gradually shed its sardonic undertone to become the reflexive rejoinder of Trump’s defenders during his first term as US president and beyond—an all-purpose deflection and rhetorical bon mot still employed to this day. During an interview with Fox News in February 2025, Elon Musk told Sean Hannity that when he mentioned Trump’s name to his companions at a recent dinner, “it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies.”

Well, a few things should be said about all this. First of all, since when did expressing scepticism about a politician’s personality or performance become a twisted fixation rather than a fundamental right? The ugliest implications of the TDS accusation recall the policies of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s, when political dissidents were diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and incarcerated in psychiatric wards if they ventured to criticise communism’s social stagnation and lack of democratic freedoms. Are we, likewise, to understand that only a deranged person would deny that Donald Trump personifies selfless public service and prudent judgement? Attacks on presidents or prime ministers in free societies are often hyperbolic, but that is not evidence of mental illness, it’s just the heat of political debate.

Accusations of TDS and Trump himself are both products of the social-media age, where the public expression of personal opinion is no longer policed by the gatekeepers of the legacy press. Fringe voices are now amplified out of all proportion to their presence in everyday society, and spasms of spite or irreverence are harder to walk back. Once upon a time, a person’s political views might have been occasionally visible in a lawn sign or a bumper sticker. Now, they are displayed (permanently, if they are not deleted) to far wider audiences on chat boards and social-media feeds, where they are rewarded with the dopamine rush of likes and shares. It can be difficult to rethink a position after it has been advertised on that kind of platform. If someone posted a cautious endorsement of Donald Trump in mid-2016, they might be more likely to double down on that enthusiasm by 2020 or 2025, and more apt to jeer that anyone who disagrees is simply deranged. Thanks to the law of the algorithm, what begins as a curious click or a casual thumbs-up may eventually become the kamikaze partisanship of the keyboard warrior.

Let me grant that it’s possible to celebrate Trump as the Great Disruptor—a leader who has finally exposed the rot at the core of American politics and the hypocrisies of the international order, weaknesses long whispered about but never before confronted so openly. On this reading, TDS victims want to avoid disruption because it threatens exhausted and ineffective norms. The danger is that those now ridiculing TDS are too taken with disruption for its own sake, gleefully cheering the obliteration of standards, agreements, and barriers. The question of what better standards, agreements, and barriers might replace those supposedly obsolete norms is frequently left unconsidered.

Trump and the DEI Counter-Revolution

Civil-rights law made the DEI world; civil-rights reform can unmake it.

QuilletteThomas F. Powers

Trump began his administration by signing executive orders intended to overturn a number of things that many Americans disliked, such as corporate DEI programs and the admission of transgender athletes in sports. But his administration risks getting carried away by its own revolutionary zeal. Many of the precedents Trump’s supporters disparage—the limits of executive power, say, or the principle of an independent civil service—may turn out to be more important to the general public than the MAGA demographic thinks. And for all of Trump’s boastful references to his mandate, he does not enjoy a bottomless well of support. Not only do about half of Trump’s own citizens dislike him, but the institutions of the courts, the military, and the academy are especially resistant. Trump and his followers may protest that these institutions are irredeemably corrupt and must submit or be swept away. But that is easier said than done—these institutions predate Trump, and they will outlast him.

All politicians make enemies, but the most successful of them are able to talk their opponents into a workable compromise, so that even those who disagree with their aims can still respect their intellect and goodwill. The people aren’t obligated to trust the politician; it’s up to the politician to earn the people’s trust. And if he can’t, blaming “fake news” is simply a cop-out. By this measure, Trump is already a failure. He’s won over a crucial bloc of the US electorate, but he’s completely alienated another. Whatever he does is met with slavish admiration by some people, and weary disgust or horrified disbelief by everyone else. Even if all his enemies have TDS, nobody has come up with an antidote—least of all Trump himself. As a test of historic greatness, simply getting away with stuff doesn’t cut it.

And Trump is not even getting away with it. His supporters look to Trump as an avatar of the “chaos” they want to embrace, yet sooner or later, chaos manifests itself not just in scandal and outrage conveyed over social media, but also in shortages at the grocery store and delays in receiving tax refunds. As with any millennialist or conspiracist outlook, there’s an element of escapism in the veneration of Trumpian disorder—it’s exciting to watch so long as we can still count on all our daily routines and conveniences, but a lot less fun when your internet goes down or your employer goes out of business. Like the scrawny punk rocker proclaiming his commitment to an “anarchy” he’d be an early casualty of in real life, online proponents of Trump-launched chaos are calling for a lawless, comfortless dystopia they’d barely survive if it ever came to pass.

What remains to be seen is whether the MAGA movement is as welcoming of corruption as it is of disruption. So far, Trump’s personal enrichment hasn’t hit Americans directly in their pocketbooks, at least not more than usual in a country where politics has long been awash in money and where legislative bodies are filled with millionaires. But if the US economy starts to wobble, even the steady diet of Trump-sympathetic content pushed by Facebook, X, and Fox News may not be enough to distract the Have-Nots in Middle America from how the Haves in Washington and Mar-a-Lago are rewarding themselves. Lots of prominent officials have had their mistakes and their conflicts of interest revealed to the world—why should Donald Trump be any different? The genuine derangement lies not in the attempt to keep pace with Trump’s many affronts to presidential statesmanship, but in the expectation that those affronts will be overlooked.

Nor will the satisfaction of logging on to own the libs and troll the snowflakes be permanent. The libs and the snowflakes haven’t gone away, and in time even the most scornful owners and trollers—the ones who most often mock Trump Derangement Syndrome—may become bored by the game or start fighting among themselves. Among Trump’s core constituents, there are already tensions between the tech “broligarchy” and the rural anti-immigration populists, between the AI libertarians and the would-be Christian theocrats, between the scourges of the Deep State at DOGE and the ordinary Joes who rely on Social Security.

And at some point, a progressive figure may arise who matches Trump’s talent for shameless media exposure, who can rally Americans to his or her side with the same type of provocations that until now have mostly titillated the Right. Put another way, the tide of the culture wars may turn, as the hubris of Make America Great Again meets its nemesis in Justice For All. At which point, the importance of the norms and guardrails Trump is carelessly bulldozing will suddenly become apparent.

Or perhaps Trump’s dominance is less likely to be ended by voters, or judges, or even by his advancing age, than by the very triumphalism he encourages in his loyalists. The president’s instinct for zero-sum I-win/you-lose vindictiveness will be adopted by his rivals, or perhaps by one of the sycophants now smiling behind him, a Brutus to Trump’s Caesar. This is Trump’s moment, but moments pass. The United States is undergoing a revolution, but revolutions have a way of eating their own. Pride goes before a fall, and so do cruelty, gloating, and self-aggrandisement. In any case, in the coming weeks, months, or years, there will inevitably come a juncture where it becomes clear that it is not Donald Trump’s critics but his acolytes who are deranged.