Let me begin by disclosing something that may surprise some of my closest friends: I did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Some of my friends will be delighted to learn this. Others may need to sit down.

People have varying opinions—strong opinions—about President Trump. They run the gamut from believing he is one of the greatest presidents in American history to believing he is worse than Adolf Hitler, worse than Satan, and deserves to be impeached, imprisoned, spit upon, murdered, resurrected, and then murdered again—in roughly that order.

That’s quite a spread.

There are those who seem to think Trump walks on water, parts the Red Sea during lunch, and has never committed so much as a grammatical error. Then there are those whose hatred of Trump is so all-encompassing that anything he does becomes evil by definition. If Trump personally rescued a basket of puppies from a burning orphanage, somebody on Facebook would complain that he was distracting attention from the kittens.

His admirers were euphoric when he won the 2024 election. Some of his foes, meanwhile, seem to experience his presidency as a chronic medical condition involving cold sweats, elevated blood pressure, spontaneous rage, and an irresistible compulsion to mention Donald Trump during conversations about subjects having absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump.

And therein lies the phenomenon that interests me.

Those in the first group can sometimes become automatons themselves—so loyal, so credulous, so unwilling to criticize their champion that critical thinking goes on an extended vacation.

There is, however, a popular term for the corresponding affliction on the other side: Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS.

I see President Trump as a package. Like the rest of us, he is a mixed bag: much that can be considered laudatory or impressive, combined with characteristics that cause one to sigh deeply and stare at the ceiling.

It is too early to know how history will ultimately assess him. Time has a way of lifting the fog of contemporary opinion and supplying clarity after the present has safely become the past. I am neither beholden to Donald Trump nor consumed with hatred for the man.

But I am fascinated by human behavior—especially the behavior of people who either find Trump mesmerizing or appear to regard his continued respiration as a personal affront.

Of the two camps, the TDS sufferers fascinate me most.

Exhibit A: The Towels

A few days ago, while scrolling through Facebook, I encountered an advertisement masquerading as a personal story. A woman—we’ll call her Susan Brown—was spinning a lengthy tale about some magnificent bath towels she supposedly encountered while staying at the Ritz-Carlton and later purchased for herself.

I am fascinated by marketing and advertising, so I recognized the device immediately. It was sales copy dressed up for Halloween as somebody’s personal anecdote.

The comments were interesting. Many readers apparently believed Susan was simply some random woman who had discovered the Holy Grail of absorbency. They loved her story. They wanted the towels. Some announced their intention to buy them immediately.

Others were skeptical.

But one gentleman apparently saw those bath towels and thought:

Donald Trump.

He never mentioned the towels. Instead, he launched into a denunciation of Trump—how Trump had ruined his life, how Trump was evil and needed to be stopped, how he was the worst human being currently drawing breath on Planet Earth, and so forth.

I stared at the comment wondering: What in heaven’s name do Donald Trump and luxury bath towels have to do with one another?

Answer: nothing.

The Facebook post could have been about Cape Canaveral. Rare coins. Frozen pizza. The San Diego Zoo. The mating habits of the Peruvian tree frog. Whether Pluto deserves to be reinstated as a planet.

It wouldn’t have mattered.

Somehow, all roads led to Trump.

That is when TDS enters an advanced stage: when even bath linens become political.

Exhibit B: The Gas Pump

My friend KH accompanied her teenage daughter one evening to a gas station. Her daughter was pumping gas while KH cleaned the windshield.

An older gentleman nearby had apparently been watching them. Eventually he walked over and, without preamble, asked KH:

“So you’re not a Trump voter, are you?”

Now there’s a conversation starter.

KH, caught off guard, answered honestly that she had voted for Trump.

The man became animated.

“How could you?! He’s ruined this country!”

He then turned to her teenage daughter.

“You didn’t vote for Trump, did you?!”

She had.

This revelation apparently brought the gentleman within several PSI of blowing a gasket.

“What’s wrong with you?! You lack critical thinking skills!”

He then informed KH that she was a bad parent.

Remember: this is a complete stranger at a gas station.

He then headed toward his vehicle and beckoned KH to follow him because—naturally—he happened to have a collection of anti-Trump decals and other paraphernalia in his car that he wanted to give her.

Because nothing causes a person to reconsider her political convictions quite like a free bumper sticker from an angry stranger at Chevron.

He opened the back of his car and began rummaging through his anti-Trump inventory.

KH and her daughter got into their car and drove away.

What possesses someone to interrogate two strangers about their presidential votes while they are pumping unleaded?

TDS.

Exhibit C: Bring Back the Gallows

Then, just yesterday, I encountered another Facebook post featuring a large photograph of Vladimir Putin
emblazoned with the words “What Putin Has on Trump.”

A commenter named Scott Cisney offered his diagnosis of the situation. According to him, Trump has been “controlled by Moscow for years” and should be investigated, tried for treason, and hanged. People affiliated with Trump should likewise be tried and hanged. Trump voters, he argued, should be barred from voting for 20 years.

He concluded by declaring that this “cancer in our body politic must be fully excised.”

Well.

Nothing says “defending democracy” quite like disenfranchising millions of voters and hanging everybody who disagrees with you.

Whatever one thinks of Trump, that is not political analysis. That is political rage dressed in a necktie.

Mr. Cisney is certainly entitled to his suspicions about Trump and Russia. But moving from suspicion to mass executions and 20-year voting bans requires a rather substantial evidentiary bridge—preferably one made of something sturdier than Facebook posts.

The Salem witch trials had a similar problem with due process.

TDS.

Exhibit D: When Trump Enters the Sickroom

The final example is sadder.

I have a dear friend who is on his deathbed. His wife is understandably distraught.

Yet even during a recent visit in which I came to say what may be my final goodbye to my friend, this otherwise lovely woman could not resist bringing up Donald Trump and launching into a lengthy denunciation of the president.

I found the moment unsettling.

Here was a room already occupied by mortality, grief, love, memory, fear, and impending loss—and somehow Donald Trump still managed to get a seat.

She had previously confided to me that some friends no longer take her phone calls because the conversations inevitably become complaints about Trump.

At some point, a political opinion stops being merely an opinion and begins occupying entirely too much mental real estate.

That, too, is what I mean by Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The New Pandemic

These four examples strike me as manifestations of a broader phenomenon.

For some people, Trump is no longer merely a politician they despise. He has become an omnipresent psychological houseguest who refuses to leave.

They go to bed thinking about him. They wake up thinking about him. He wanders into their consciousness while they watch television, eat dinner, admire a sunset, attend church, pump gasoline, visit a dying spouse—or apparently shop for bath towels.

That is the part I find fascinating.

You can despise Donald Trump. You can oppose every policy he proposes. You can regard his personality as obnoxious, his rhetoric as appalling, his presidency as disastrous, and his hair as an unresolved engineering problem.

But if the man has taken up permanent residence inside your head, he is winning a contest you didn’t need to enter.

And perhaps that is the strangest irony of Trump Derangement Syndrome: the people who most desperately want Donald Trump out of their lives are sometimes the very people who refuse to let him leave.

I wonder what will happen when he is finally out of office.

And someday, inevitably, Donald Trump will die, whether by assassination, food poisoning, heart failure, being hit by a car, etc. When that happens, I suspect some sufferers of advanced TDS will experience something resembling a ten-month Mardi Gras.

But perhaps even then Trump won’t really be gone.

Because by that point, he won’t merely have been a president.

He’ll have become a habit.

And that, my friends, is the latest elephant in the room.