Varieties of Trump Derangement Syndrome

 by Roger Kimball

One of the philosopher William James’s most popular books is Varieties of Religious Experience. Published in 1902 and subtitled “A Study in Human Nature,” the book is based on James’s Gifford Lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh. It is impressive how many states of mind James is willing to group under the category “religious.” I suspect some people might cavil at the proposition that the book was really an exercise in theology, natural, supernatural, or otherwise. That said, James’s catalogue of heightened, or at least altered, states of mind does have the virtue of reminding us of how wide the spectrum of human experience, not to say eccentricity, is. And it occurs to me that James’s distinction between “healthy-mindedness” and “morbid-mindedness,” set forth in a chapter on “The Sick Soul,” is of particular pertinence at a time, like ours, when the effort to normalize various pathologies seems to be, as we have been taught to say, trending.

And this, in fact, is why I mention James’s interesting book. It is not only religion that admits to a wide variety of expressions. That may be said of many other passions. Consider, for example, the passion denominated “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” commonly abbreviated TDS. The malady is akin to, though much more dangerous than, Bush Derangement Syndrome, first identified and catalogued by the late, great Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer defined BDS as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.” As to the nature of the disease, Krauthammer speculated that its etiology might be some sort of “virus” whose effects threatened to become “epidemic” among susceptible populations (in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for example).

Although its distempers seemed aggravated at the time, we may now look back on the era of George W. Bush as a time of relative comity. That is because the advent of Trump Derangement Syndrome pumped the whole phenomenon full of steroids and turned the volume up to—well, I was going to say “to 11,” but it is much worse than that.

The attention needed to sustain a state of emergency is difficult to maintain, and it has been my observation that the true insanity of TDS has faded from the public consciousness—always assuming that its recognition was ever widely appreciated. An analysis and history of the phenomenon forms a leitmotif in Victor David Hanson’s excellent new book The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.

There are two things to register about TDS. The first is how virulent it is. The second is how it tends to worsen, not attenuate, with the passage of time. Farr’s Law does not seem to be operative in the career of this virus. During Trump’s first term, we saw things we had never seen in this country before. The parade of women in pink “pussy hats” was just a local variation on the sort of thing that might have plagued George W. Bush. But as Trump’s first term unfolded, the insanity increased. There was the whole “Russia Collusion Hoax,” for example, a caper hatched in the White House in the final days of Barack Obama’s second term. It was meant to delegitimize and ultimately end the Trump administration, and it very nearly did.

Then there came the systematic censorship and deplatforming of the president of the United States. He was booted off various social media platforms—what were then Twitter, Facebook, etc.—and essentially denied an effective means of communicating with his supporters. Pause for a moment to consider how bizarre it was that the president of the United States was censored and denied a place in the national conversation.

It gets worse. “Grok: Is it true that Trump was debanked?” “Yes—in 2021, after January 6, several large banks closed accounts tied to Donald Trump and Trump businesses.”

What happened

JPMorgan Chase closed more than 50 personal and business accounts in February 2021, including hotel, development, retail, and private-banking accounts. In a 2026 court filing in Trump’s $5 billion lawsuit, the bank acknowledged the closures. It has not given a detailed public reason in the original notices; it says it does not close accounts for political or religious reasons and cites legal or regulatory risk.

Capital One closed more than 300 Trump Organization and affiliated accounts around March 2021. In later court papers, it said the decision followed an internal anti-money-laundering review of transaction patterns. It has not accused the company of money laundering. The Trump side calls that a pretext.

Other lenders, including Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank, were widely reported to have ended or refused further business with Trump entities in the same period.

But don’t take Grok’s word for it. The New York Times also reported the story.

Pause again to reflect on how surreal it was that the president of the United States should be denied banking services.

But it turns out that all that was but a “hold-my-beer” prelude. For in 2022, mere days after Trump announced his intention to run again for the presidency, an unprecedented raft of lawfare got going in earnest against Trump. In other words, his opponents graduated from trying to censor and silence Trump to trying to bankrupt and incarcerate him. Trump was a “fascist,” the reincarnation of “Hitler,” “a vile creature,” said Nancy Pelosi in 2025, the “worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Think about that. Is it any wonder that impressionable misfits like Thomas Matthew Crooks and others should have armed themselves and attempted to remove a man whom the media had abused in such categorical terms?

The great irony, of course, is the disjunction between the monster conjured up by the media and the indefatigable public servant who has done so much to “Make America Great Again.”

But my point is not only that expressions of Trump Derangement Syndrome have become more extreme. They have also become more multifarious. Consider, to take just one example, the bizarre behavior of Mark Carney, prime minister of that great fastness to the north, Canada. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Carney, unhappy with Trump’s mean tweets and even meaner tariffs, said that he had instructed his lieutenants to prepare for the contingency that the United States might mount an armed invasion of Canada. OK, Carney acknowledged, the risk is low, but it would be “irresponsible” not to prepare. Defence Minister David McGuinty and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Soloman echoed Carney’s concerns. Listen carefully: that tune you hear in the background is the theme from The Twilight Zone. A U.S. Navy spokesman, asked what he intended to do about all this,  laughed incredulously. “Do you want my battle plans for the Martians, too?” he asked.

The Canadian author and entrepreneur Conrad Black was much tarter. The prime minister of Canada and his associates are intelligent men, Black noted. “The odds that all three of them would simultaneously become afflicted by the same psychotic delusion is infinitesimally small. The only rational conclusion, therefore, is that they believe, or rather their polling data shows, that enough Canadians are so possessed by Trump Derangement that engaging in such asinine demagoguery is politically expedient.”

That U.S. admiral invoked Martians. Conrad Black cited more terrestrial phantasmagoria. Despite the current tensions between the U.S. and Canada, Black said, “We are so far removed from a military incursion at our southern border that we may as well be strategizing the response to the equally plausible threat of Santa Claus leading an invasion of elves from the north.” Indeed. But what if we had to deal with the black swan? What if the United States did decide to invade? Black is good on that, too.

If we woke up tomorrow in some parallel reality where the United States actually was contemplating a full-scale military campaign against Canada, with all due respect to our brave men and women in uniform, the only preparations to be made would be negotiating the terms of our unconditional surrender. Some brave and patriotic Canadians may refuse to submit and instead choose to conduct, as a matter of principle, a brutal and bloody guerrilla warfare campaign against the strongest conventional and nuclear military force in the history of the world. Unfortunately, they would be in the precarious position of having to rely on our miserly European allies, or countries like Russia or China, whose recent actions have been significantly more hostile and provocative challenges to our sovereignty than the U.S. tariffs, to supply us with weapons, and they would not remotely be adequate. It’s all so desperately preposterous.

Indeed. But that is precisely what a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome gets you: the surreal, the malign, the preposterous.

https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/27/varieties-of-trump-derangement-syndrome/