Consider the meme I recently saw online which accompanies this article — imperfect, perhaps, but nonetheless illuminating. The meme depicts 4 relatively recent U.S. Presidents with an indication of two data-points: how many illegal alien deportations took place under each President along with how many protests/riots took place as a result of such deportations.
President Bill Clinton is said to have overseen more than 12 million deportations during his time in office and experienced precisely zero mass protests or riots over it. President George W. Bush deported over 10 million people, again with no sustained protest movement. President Barack Obama, often dubbed the “Deporter in Chief” by immigration activists, deported just over 5 million—and still, no nationwide protest frenzy, no cultural meltdown, no shrill hysteria.
Enter President Donald J. Trump. Roughly 1.5 million deportations — the lowest numbers of deportations by a large margin, and suddenly the republic is allegedly on the brink of fascism. Hundreds of protests and riots. Endless media outrage. Families torn apart at dinner tables. Friendships dissolved. Therapy sessions consumed.
The policy outcomes alone cannot explain the reaction. Something else is at work.
That “something else” is obsession.
A psychiatrist appeared on Fox News a couple of months ago—calm, clinical, not prone to hyperbole—and stated that an increasing number of his patients are suffering from what he unabashedly called Trump Derangement Syndrome. He noted, with a mixture of concern and bemusement, that it often manifests itself within the first ten minutes of an initial appointment. Patients bring Trump up unsolicited. They return to him compulsively. He becomes the gravitational center of their emotional universe.
These are not people directly affected by Trump policies. These are not policy analysts or constitutional scholars. These are regular, everyday individuals who cannot so much as enjoy a vacation if they see Trump’s name scroll across a CNN monitor in an airport terminal because the mere mention of Trump’s name triggers them. They cannot sip a coffee, wait for a flight, or enjoy a sunset without being emotionally hijacked by the mere mention of a man they claim to despise. Hatred, it turns out, is still a form of fixation.
I’ve seen this up close. The wife of a dear friend of mine in Sunnyvale, California is a textbook case. She is otherwise intelligent and functional, but when it comes to Donald Trump, she is utterly possessed — and please note that she is the one who feels she must bring up the subject of President Trump to anyone who will listen to her, to the point that many people in her life no longer take her phone calls, or if they do, she admits they often ask her not to discuss Donald Trump because it’s the only thing she seems interested in talking about. During a recent visit I had with my friend (her husband), she launched into a nonstop, shrill rant about Trump that lasted at least thirty minutes or more — without pause, without self-awareness, without any concern for whether her audience (me) agreed or even wished to participate. Trump is the number one thing she thinks about. And she is deeply, palpably miserable.
This is the cruel irony of TDS: it punishes its sufferers far more than its supposed target. Trump goes about his life while his critics lose sleep, lose joy, lose perspective.
Social media provides a daily parade of similar examples. Scroll through X or Facebook and you’ll find people who claim to be “anti-hate” vibrating with rage at the mere existence of Donald Trump. Caps-lock denunciations. Apocalyptic predictions. Moral grandstanding so overheated it borders on parody. These are not reasoned critiques of policy or character; they are emotional seizures.
And when such individuals are accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the response is almost comical in its predictability. They insist that you are the one suffering from TDS — because you like Trump, or support him, or even merely refuse to join the hysteria. In other words, disliking Trump to the point of obsession is “normal,” but liking him—or tolerating him—is evidence of mental illness, so they claim. This is not argument. It is projection. And it is, frankly, crazy talk.
None of this requires one to admire Donald Trump, or be a fan of Trump, or agree with everything and anything he does. Although I did not vote for him in the 2026 President Election, and although I was dismayed at a number of things he has done (e.g., calling a reporter “Piggy,” writing without much sympathy or probity re. the death of Rob Reiner, or foolishly allowing his Chief of Staff, Susan Wiles, to be extensively interviewed by Vanity Fair magazine, a media publication staffed by people who utterly loathe Donald Trump, which could only result in an anti-Trump hit piece – which is precisely what happened) I am able to see the positive things Mr. Trump does (e.g., using his powerful force of personality to stop wars, securing deals with foreign nations that will economically benefit the United States, securing our southern border, making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, introducing Trump Accounts, creating over 654,000 private-sector jobs, lowering gasoline prices, securing a drop in the prices of pharmaceuticals, increased output for domestic oil and gas production, etc.) One can oppose his policies. One can dislike his brash personality. One can vote against him enthusiastically. But if one man dominates your emotional life, ruins your vacations, hijacks your conversations, and leaves you perpetually anxious and enraged, the problem is no longer political. It’s psychological.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is real—not because Trump is beyond criticism, but because no single political figure should have this much power over anyone’s inner life. When hatred becomes identity, and obsession masquerades as virtue, something has gone badly wrong. And the saddest part is this: the people most afflicted by TDS believe they’re the sane ones—while their joy, peace, and perspective quietly slip away.
And that, my friends, is the latest elephant in the room.
