Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing. But it's MAGA maniacs who are infected
Republicans want to pretend the national revulsion to Trump's authoritarianism is irrational, while their defense of the president is fraught with insane conspiracism and racial hatred.
Republicans want to designate #TrumpDerangementSyndrome a form of mental illness. But as with all things GOP, this is an acute case of projection.
Sure, #TDS is very much a thing. It’s a MAGA thing.
There’s a Republican bill in the Minnesota House to designate #TDS a form of mental illness:
Bill SF 2589 in Minnesota describes the so-called Trump derangement syndrome as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump."
"Symptoms may include Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump's behavior.
"This may be expressed by:
"Verbal expressions of intense hostility toward President Donald J. Trump; and
"Overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald J. Trump or anything that symbolizes President Donald J. Trump."
An Ohio congressman, Warren Davidson, recently introduced a bill to study #TDS:
"TDS has divided families, the country, and led to nationwide violence—including two assassination attempts on President Trump. The TDS Research Act would require the NIH to study this toxic state of mind, so we can understand the root cause and identify solutions," said Davidson.
Of course, "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump” could just as easily be applied to Trump’s often-violent MAGA supporters.
So I’ve collected a handful of videos—just a tiny sample from the thousands available—to remind everyone what Real Trump Derangement Syndrome looks like. They range from 2016 to the present. The first is from a Trump rally in February 2025, featuring a positively unhinged MAGA devotee:
The secondary wellspring of so much of this kind of lunacy, of course, is Alex Jones and his pathological Infowars program. Here he is in October 2016, a few days after the Access Hollywood tapes were released:
It was also readily found at Fox News. Here’s Chuck Woolery during a 2016 Fox & Friends segment, peddling the antisemitic “cultural Marxism” theory:
Predictably, this kind of rhetoric unleashed the violent and unstable elements in Trump’s army, producing behavior like this on the campaign trail in Mesa, Arizona:
It was a common element in the 2020 campaign too, highlighted by the “Trump Train” freeway assault on a Biden campaign bus in Texas in November:
Of course, the most pronounced and singular instance of Real Trump Derangement occurred after Trump lost, when a mob of thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol at hius behest in an attempt to prevent the election’s outcome from being enacted on Jan. 6, 2020.
We all saw how all those cop-loving “patriots” loosed their lethal force upon the badly outnumbered Capitol Police, calling them traitors while they ransacked the temple of democracy.
Terrorizing Congress at Trump’s urging, the mob unhinged mob rampaged through the halls of both the House and the Senate, demanding to lynch the House Speaker.
They also demanded the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, and then ransacked the floor of the Senate.
Ashli Babbitt was the apotheosis of the Real Trump Derangement Syndrome that day. Having traveled all the way from Texas, she was part of a mob that came frighteningly close to lynching members of the House as they fled. She went into a frenzy when she saw those members escaping the mob’s clutches, and jumped into a broken window frame to nab them, ignoring warnings she would be shot. Her fanaticism killed her just as surely as the police officer’s bullet. Nonetheless, her family was handed $5 million by Trump’s administration this week to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit.
The decision outraged the outgoing Capitol Police chief, with good cause:
“I am extremely disappointed and disagree with this settlement,” Chief Thomas Manger said, noting that a prior DOJ investigation found no wrongdoing by police. “This settlement sends a chilling message to law enforcement nationwide, especially to those with a protective mission like ours.”
Rather than the fever breaking, the spread of the #RTDS infection has only deepened since Jan. 6, thanks largely to its normalization in the mainstream media.
At an October 2021 MAGA-fueled gathering in Nampa, Idaho, led by Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, one of his audience members asked: “When do we get to use the guns? … How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?” A Republican Idaho legislator later chimed in that it was a “fair question.”
Then there was Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers, speaking to Nick Fuentes’ annual gathering of white nationalists in 2022, calling for gallows to be built for their enemies.
As Trump campaigned for reelection in 2023 and 2024, the madness became a daily feature. Here’s a typical MAGA supporter voicing her outrage over Trump’s arraignment on 34 felony counts for fraud in 2023 :
When Trump was convicted on all 34 of those counts in 2024, that kind of unhinged rhetoric was amplified and given mainstream imprimatur from the right-wing media, such as this talking head at Newsmax who warned that Democrats should prepare for retribution should Trump ever win back office:
It’s really not hard to find examples of utterly gobsmacking lunacy among the Trumpist right. They’re everywhere you turn. The realm of Christian-nationalist MAGA fanatics is especially mind-bending.
The derangement is especially acute among the evangelical anti-LGBTQ crowd, where exhortations for gays and transgender people to be brutally murdered are thick on the ground.
The funny thing about Rep. Davidson’s proposal is that in reality, it’s unlikely that Republicans will be able to demonstrate that anti-Trump belligerents behave with as much violence, threats, and irrational conspiracism as MAGA fanatics. Davidson mentions the assassination attempt against Trump—but it was committed by a registered Republican, raised in a Republican household, who indulged in antisemitic and racist anti-immigrant rhetoric online. There’s zero evidence that he was animated by anti-Trump rhetoric; rather, his more mundane motive appears to have been seeking an assassin’s fame.
Anti-Trump protesters may get loud and angry, and may engage in low-level reactive violence with police. But they do not extoll Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or anyone else in messianic religious terms, they do not threaten Republican campaign buses, they do not demand the deaths of their opponents, and they certainly have never attempted to overthrow the government. It might indeed be good to study the violence around Trump and the MAGA army, but an accurate study based in the real world would produce different results than what Davidson and his fellow Republicans fantasize to be the case.
As always with the MAGA, it’s ultimately just a raging case of projection.