We All Have T.D.S. Because Donald Trump Is, In Fact, Deranged
And he's ruining the vibe of Western liberal democracy
You either love him like he’s your godhead prophet, or you hate him for being a moral, legal, democratic, and aesthetic stain on US society and history.
Either way you’re deranged about it. We’re all deranged because Trump is deranged, and he drags us all along in his derangement.
Have you ever seen Trump be truly thankful for the magnificent opportunities in his life? He manages to be bitter about everything despite living decades as a billionaire (allegedly), self-proclaimed playboy, real-estate tycoon, reality TV star, and, twice, the President of the United States of America. He’ll start a fight with anyone, and look on cruelly as his supporters make deplorable threats of violence. Could a post-politics, retired Trump be any more capable of offering retrospection or introspection than the Kelvin Scale zero he exhibits now?
How many other elderly people around do you see acting like Trump acts? What if everyone in society behaved like him? Civilization would collapse! Trump is an extreme outlier of derangement in human psychology not found almost anywhere else.
Can you imagine Trump sitting back and quietly passing his final years like regular elderly? Doting on his children and grandchildren? Trying to squeeze out a few more hangouts with Eric? Walking along the beach with Melania? He’s almost never seen in public with his wife. He has more of business relationships with his family than father or husband relationships. His personal life is very weird.
It’s easy to imagine him on his deathbed still demanding everyone around him believe 2020 was rigged against him, and that “covfefe” was a secret message, and the hurricane really was going toward Alabama, and his 2016 inauguration crowd size was the biggest, and he actually won all the popular votes, and his hands aren’t small, and he accomplished more in one term than Lincoln and Washington put together.
This abnormal personality is why psychological experts suggest he shows all the signs of malignant narcissism.
Can you picture Trump in an interview ever acknowledging a mistake? Expressing regrets? Acknowledging times when his personal hubris backfired? Grappling contextually with the historically negative reactions he has inspired in so many of his fellow citizens? Apologizing for any of the casually lamentable things he has said about random actresses, gold star families, wounded veterans, faithful public servants, entire groups of people in America that collectively make up a majority of the nation, or anyone else he been petty with lashing out like an emotionally dysregulated toddler?
The deranged personality with which Trump is burdened must be so exhausting for him. It’s sure exhausting for me to watch. His character defects are napoleonic in their delusions of self-aggrandizement, and he just never shuts up about anything. He never lets anything go. He never accepts any criticism, no matter how small. His north star is a deranged obsession with getting vengeance on people. And there are so many people he both wants vengeance against and deserves vengeance from.
He was in court or legal strategizing meetings most of last year, for prosecutions and lawsuits ranging from defamed rape, to rampant fraud, to election fraud, to deadly insurrection, to national security treason. And there is a cornucopia of relatively smaller crimes like witness tampering, obstruction of justice, perjury, emoluments clause violations, tax evasion. He has officially proved that it’s just too much effort and cost for the US legal system to hold a deranged lunatic like Trump accountable for nonstop criming.
Again, how many people have you known or even heard about who have spent their lifetimes personally and documentedly screwing over so many people from business partners and contractors to customers and investors and his own family members? Tens of thousands of people were impacted by his belligerent avarice even before he got into politics, when he was merely obsessed with slapping his ogre name on as many gaudy buildings as he could in the 70s. All these years later, now in his second term as President, his vulgar con man racket is still going.
Donald Trump is the most deranged American living right now, and a lot of the people you might suspect could give him a run for his money in a competition of the most deranged Americans — Elon Musk, the Tate brothers, Jeffrey Epstein, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, etc. — are greatly supportive of or have been personal friends with Trump.
Meanwhile, the world’s most dictatorial sociopaths keep getting caught supporting and colluding with his political campaigns. Despite regularly insulting America’s many liberal democracy allies, Trump never seems to have a negative word to say about Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. He has accidental dinner parties with white supremacists. You know what you call someone who won’t kick a Nazi out of their house? A Nazi. This is not normal. It is deranged.
Contrast Trump with Jimmy Carter, an ex-president who doesn’t regularly attack and scapegoat most of America. Can you imagine Trump devoting his life to charity for his remaining years like Carter has? Getting his hands dirty and building homes for the poor? What a laugh!
But Trump will remain always bitter about everything because he knows more than anyone that all the opportunistic freeloaders around him have all along really just been interested in getting in on his grift and profiting off the proximity that allows them to swindle his pavlovianized MAGA cult too. Malignant narcissists like Trump don’t have real friends.
Trump is a political adaptation of his reported favorite film, Sunset Boulevard, personified. His body will break down as he continues shouting out into the approaching void that he is human history’s greatest winner, yet most pitiable victim. He’ll feebly toss burger plates against the wall smearing ketchup when he gets upset. He will get only angrier, and, as his cultural relevance fades, he will petulantly demand the world pay attention to him with ever more deplorable acts of repugnant indecency well beneath the dignity of the Office of the Presidency in service to the American people.
We’re fortunate Trump’s demagogic political hold on racists, misogynists, and other idiot xenophobes was not grasped in an earlier decade of his life, and we must surely be getting close to the end of his mascot career inspiring the most politically deplorable people in this country whose minds simmer always with culture war division and toxic hate as they punch down and look for marginalized groups of people on which they can blame all their problems, personal failings, and fears of living in a country that necessarily evolves and adapts to an ever changing global world.
The derangement cannot last forever, and Trump’s deranging effect on American life has no real heir thanks to the unique sociopathy his childhood fostered. Perhaps Lindsey Graham’s prophetic warning that Trump would destroy the GOP will come more into focus as Trump’s eventual end reveals how much he has hollowed out the Republican Party and filled it in with the weak sawdust of a personality cult.
Trump is sucking the GOP dry like a parasitic leech. He is a Nosferatu of liberal democracy. He is the kind of tyrant the ancient Greek democracy we are modeled after would have voted to ostracize and expel from Athens.
But, until he dies or leaves the White House, Trump is subjecting us all to another exhausting four-year marathon of impulsive controversy, needless cruelty, casual absurdity, and omnipresent derangement. After four years of relative Biden Administration calm, we must once again wake up daily to check our phones and see what part of our liberal democracy the demagogue arsonist has set on fire today.
It’s true I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, but we all do, and he cannot help himself except to quite belligerently go out of his way to infect us all. 🥃
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I always assumed TDS was a way of Trump voters owning themselves for how grossly obsessed they are with him.
I think this was your first "more than halfway true" post. Spot on.
This lard bucket of feces ruined the lives of people in my freshman class of college: they had to drop out because he bankrupted their families by not paying for work on his Jersey casinos. Yeah, I've had progressive TDS (Trump Disgust Syndrome) since 1976. Then the slimeball actually came out to a golf tournament my husband played in and proceeded to openly cheat in front of everyone. (They guy who invited him ended up getting blown up in a car bomb in the club's parking lot later; if you saw 20/20 last week, that was him. Only the best people, you know.) I met "it" at the tourney dinner and almost threw up right there. He was cheating on wife #1 with eventual wife #2 at the time. As we said in those days, "Gag me with a spoon."