Do You Have TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome)?

Radical Radha and I radically look at TDS: Who's got it (almost everybody), how badly, and most importantly, what you can do for your mental health

CC0 public domain image from Pxhere

Radical Radha at Radically Pragmatic, who did something truly radical this week (I’ll let you find out in her piece) radically doesn’t read the news which is why her Trump Derangement Syndrome is markedly lower than mine. Let’s let her speak first since she’s the Voice of Reason. If you want to know how you can keep up on the news without going all Hulk Smash on the latest outrage du jour, check out my thoughts after hers.

RADHA:

If you live in the U.S. post-Trump inauguration, chances are you’re either livid or ecstatic. But there’s a Third Way: Don’t give a f**k. Those of us who refuse to watch the news are the true radicals because we’re not giving in to the attention economy. You think the #Resistance media is angry about Trump? No, they’re excited to have glued eyeballs for another four years in a time of audience erosion because of Substack and other platforms.

The Resistance feeds on manufactured outrage as Trump feeds on trolling them. It’s a truly symbiotic relationship. When they opened the last administration by banning Muslims, they masterfully trolled the left. I fell for it and protested at an airport where zero Muslims were being detained. I still have an embarrassing picture of the sign I made to remind me how much of a sheep I was back then.

So, don’t fall for it. I recognize you are probably worried about your 401k. Harris was the perfect Sacred Victim for the left to put up for sacrifice and then crow about how she was a victim of racism and sexism. It was a masterful trolling of those who think immutable identity isn’t a qualifier for a job, much less for the most power ever. The left now has the perfect victim narrative to fall back on whenever you criticize them or Trump. If you criticize the Democrats’ choices leading up to the election, you are deemed ‘unhelpful’ at best and racist/sexist at worst. If you criticize Trump, you are admonished for not supporting Harris. But what if you called their bluff and resisted their enforcement of feminized managerial capitalism? But what if you called their bluff and resisted their enforcement of feminine behavioral norms on the public sphere? Could the culture change?

The woke are going to double down on their version of reality: That women are victims and Trump is the ultimate bully. Don’t let that fool you. They depend on the presence of a boogeyman like Trump to claim victim status. They will be even more zealous in their policing of manners and speech like women have done since the beginning of time; indeed, feminism isn’t a break from the way women have evolved but a logical development based on the mass entry of women into the workforce. Managerial capitalism needed an ideological mechanism of sustenance, and work-as-feminist-liberation provided it. This regime is held up by ideological purity tests to enforce group loyalty. Such movements intensify in times of cultural and economic turmoil. Now would be the time to delete your Twitter profile and get off social media. It is the provenance of the rigidly ideological professional class woman.

Social media is symbiotic with modern feminized managerial capitalism. White-collar women on Instagram and Twitter are just waiting to burn heretics at the stake; don’t let it happen to you. The bullies will intensify their social policing, and you don’t want to be around for their antics.

However, now is the time to insist on intellectual honesty and independence. There will be much pressure to conform to the commands of the mean girls of fourth-wave feminism. But they depend on us all backing down because of reputation destruction. What if we were to refuse? What if, when they call us racist and sexist, we choose not to care? What if we recognized their arguments as fallacies that have no place in the public sphere? What if we told professional-class women that they were wrong? Oh, I dream of such a world. I stopped being anonymous this week because they don’t have power over me.

Yes, we may have an economic downturn. Some of us are better positioned to weather that than others; an unfortunate truth. I don’t want to pretend everything will be fine when it likely won’t. But, this happened because enough people decided to punish the moralizing wealthy women who attempted to impose their views on society. To turn the tide, we have to depose them. Also, don’t read the news. It’s bad for your mental health, you can’t do anything about it, and your time is better spent trying to create the kind of world you want to live in. Volunteer, run for local office, talk to people and try to change their minds (the most difficult of the three). We will survive this as we survived last time, and after this he can’t be president again. We hope.

Free for commercial use photo by Martin Vorel at Libreshot

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GSL:

Whether you’re a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, an ex-Democrat, or living in North America (yes, Canada too!), you’re probably just as tired of dealing with Trump Derangement Syndrome as we are.

You’re arguably Trump-deranged yourself unless you’re mega-MAGA.

Neither of us voted for Trump although Radical Radha has a somewhat higher opinion of him than I. I occasionally suffer mostly private bouts of TDS when I’ve spent too much time on ExTwitter (10+ seconds) but then I shut it down and remind myself: This is the cesspool of humanity. The digital Australia degenerate dump. (Sorry, Oz, I know you’re a lot more than an ex-repository for criminals today! You’re descendants of degenerates, and your land is populated by vicious baby-eating dingoes, killer snakes, giant spiders, and flowers that can kill if you look at them the wrong way. But we will always love you as long as you continue to speak so adorably!)

But similarly, there are people on ExTwitter who want to kill you because you don’t agree with them on absolutely everything they have an opinion about.

The worst of the insanely poisonous wildlife found on social media are those infected with TDS—Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Know Your TDS!

Political derangement syndromes have been around since the beginning of democracy, and probably before. In 46 BC, the Roman senator and statesman Cato the Younger committed suicide after descending into alcoholism caused by Caesar Derangement Syndrome. In a story you’ve probably heard before, he couldn’t stand the leader who he and his buddy Marcus Tullius Cicero believed had ‘bamboozled’ the lower classes and waged warfare on open government and even worse, getting himself appointed, literally, ‘dictator for life’ (dictator perpetuo). And we all know how that ended.

Cicero, too, considered ending it all—what was there left to live for??? ROME IS F**KED!--but the adherent to Stoic philosophy rethought his position and went on to produce great works including Julius Caesar Was A Big Fat Idiot before Marc Antony put out a hit on him.

Okay, I’m kidding about the book.

Before today, we all knew people with Harris Derangement Syndrome, Clinton Derangement Syndrome (1992-2000, 2016 campaign) and Bush Derangement Syndrome. My mother and uncle warned us never to mention FDR in front of my grandfather as he still had, thirty years later, then-undiagnosed Roosevelt Derangement Syndrome.

I believe there are two kinds of TDS: The justified, and the over-the-top.

There’s genuine justification for fear of the Trumpocalypse, Part II. The man is the Lord of Chaos. He’s done exactly what his terrified mostly left-leaning critics claimed he’d do, work towards becoming a dictator perpetuo.

The Constitution, democracy, and law be damned. The need for well-designed and informed strategies to clean up what is admittedly a mismanaged federal government be damned. Trump and his evil henchman Elon Musk are ripping through undocumented government ‘waste’ like Grant took Richmond.

Let’s not forget Project 2025, the Christian Nationalist manifesto to create a religious dictatorship where the progressive left failed. Some of what we’ve seen so far is straight out of the document Trump claims to have known nothing about.

Although many of Trump’s actions hail straight out of Batshit Crazy Central, with zero prior mention in either Da Project or his campaign promises. Mostly, his threats to conquer everybody in a 19th-century-reminiscent orgy of manifest destiny. His previously unexpressed desires to Make America Great Again include turning Canada into a 51st state, taking Greenland from Denmark, reclaiming the Panama Canal and turning the Holy Land into a haven for the super-rich when they get bored with Dubai.

So yeah, there’s some real justification for a fearful TDS, especially if you don’t live in America.

The other kind is what might be termed Low Information TDS, characterized by people whose opinions are formed by questionably factual sources, hysterical podcasts and ExTwitter, from which Trump pinched his Evil Henchman Da Muskrat.

These TDSers are the folks who make less of a rational case for why Trump is going to destroy democracy and quite possibly bring about the Big Crunch/End Of The Universe early.

We’re not saying Trump won’t do that, you understand, but we think it will take longer than four years, and we prefer our TDS highly reliably-sourced. If your Trump-deranged friends and family are getting their information from Alternet, Huffington Post or MSNBC, their assessments are probably about as politically realistic as Cato Junior’s rants on a massive mead bender.

Unless you’re a billionaire or a homeless dude, you probably have some skin in the game if you live in Trumptopia. You’re probably, if you’re being honest, a bit TDS-y yourself, at least sometimes. And you may have very good reasons for wanting to keep up with the news, which means we might as well make it the most accurately-sourced TDS we can. Here’s how.

Recalibrate your news consumption

Consume your news from the most reliable sources you can find. I like the source aggregatror Media Bias Fact Check. They have a ‘Bias Category’ menu item. Click ‘Least Biased’ on the dropdown menu for a list of what is, at the moment, the most opinion-free sources MBFC finds. Never assume just because your source passes muster that it will forever; during Trumpocalypse The Prequel I fired CNN and adopted Associated Press, which today has slipped a little on both bias and factualism. Although they’re an IFCN (International Fact-Checking Network) fact-checker, MBFC notes the AP uses somewhat more left-loaded language and dings them for failing a fact check. I myself will ding MBFC a bit for stating IFCN utilizes “pro-science sources such as the American Academy of Pediatrics,” which I can tell you is still pushing science-free gender transition nonsense for children. So even MBFC can get it wrong.

Another bias-control website that claims to “break free from algorithms,” is Ground News. It comes as a basic (free) and ‘pro’ (fee) app you can download onto your mobile to check for bias and receive multiple perspectives on stories and issues you won’t get from most single news sites.

And as for the IFCN, it’s a ten-year-old fact-checking site that’s considered one of the best, part of the Poynter Institute which is a non-profit newsroom and journalism training center that strives to promote highly factual news reporting eliminating whatever bias one can, including with chemotherapy when necessary.

Human-run organizations, though, are never 100% bias-free and that includes the IFCN, so never rely on one particular fact-checker to get everything right with zero bias. I also like Snopes and Politifact.

One last thing: The Low-information TDSers ignore the checks and balances in the government, however crippled they’ve been for many years, not just from the TrumpRat wrecking ball. They ignore stuff like: Wiser courts are already putting the brakes on some of Trump’s Executive Disorders. Ending ‘birthright citizenship’ ended like a day later, ruled by a federal court as unconstitutional. Others have been put on hold, like his orders to return transgender prisoners to male prisons. The Muskrat and his cybercherries have been ordered out of the Treasury Department datacenter like naughty ‘90s teenage hackers. The LITDS’s also fail to understand the GOP isn’t monolithic in its support of Trump. While Trump meets with Putin to ‘solve’ the Ukraine crisis sans Ukraine, Europe is meeting similarly to discuss the US’s place in the world without the US. Canada is doubling down and even the seals in Greenland have donned frickin’ lasers on their heads. Much can happen and much will in the next few months. The highly discerning TDSer should wait and see.

Julius Caesar was assassinated by others afraid of his power gluttony, his self-created dictator perpetuo and the fear he might crown himself king of Rome (wouldn’t that, though, be overkill at this point?)

Someone else might well heed that lesson.

The funeral pyre upon which the dead Caesar burned. Roman forum in Rome. Photo by the author

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Podcast beep sound effect by emircanalp <read that backwards!> on Pixabay

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When Radical Radha and I aren’t on Zoom debating such weighty forthcoming topics like, “Whom can we piss off now about DEI?” and “How many women’s heads would explode if we featured stories by men discriminated against by women?” we laugh maniacally while doing Jagerbombs with Pete Hegseth and Voldemort here on Substack.