Let’s get something straight.
If trump were actually a decent human being. Kind, considerate, compassionate, responsible, honest. If he had a track record of doing 99 things right and only one thing wrong, and we still piled on that one thing like it was the crime of the century, then sure. Your little acronym would make sense. Slap the label on us. We’d deserve it.
Oh no, he wore the wrong color suit for the season. The outrage! Oh no, someone overheard him ordering Grey Poupon for his hot dog, how elitist! If that’s the kind of shit we were dragging him for while everything else about the man was picture perfect, then fine, diagnose us. Trump Derangement Syndrome, stage four, no cure in sight. Because making that big a deal over a condiment would be fucking stupid.
But that is not what is happening. Not even close.
Here’s what “TDS” actually requires you to believe. It requires you to believe trump does virtually nothing wrong, and that we are the unhinged ones, hunting for imaginary crimes against a man who’s basically a saint. That is an insane amount of benefit of the doubt to give a 80 year old man who can’t get through a cabinet meeting without falling asleep in it.
The real situation is closer to the opposite. He’s maybe done one or two things that could charitably be called okay, and everything else has been steeped in greed, petty vengeance, selfishness, and short sighted stupidity. We genuinely cannot keep up with the daily firehose of shit this man produces, unprecedented, credibility destroying garbage, week after week after week. And that’s before we even get to his personal character, most of which would get a normal person avoided at a barbecue.
So let’s do a little test. You have to answer honestly.
How many people do you know who would remain your friend if they openly lusted after their own daughter and said, out loud, that if she weren’t his daughter he’d probably be dating her? If you’ve got even an ounce of decency, I already know your answer. Let’s move on.
What if your neighbor bragged that he paid for all his home renovations by stiffing the contractors, then buried them in litigation until they went broke and gave up? Would you respect that neighbor? I didn’t think so.
What if you had a coworker who constantly bragged about how great he was, took credit for work he didn’t do, and never once took responsibility for the projects he personally fucked up, blaming everyone else in the office instead? You’d avoid him in the break room. Everyone would.
What about the guy, and you know at least one of him, who brags nonstop about the women he’s slept with, the cars he owns, and the money he has, when you’re pretty sure most of it is bullshit? Aren’t those conversations exhausting? Doesn’t everyone try to find a reason to walk away?
None of these examples are even the serious stuff. Most of us have already accepted this is just his baseline. The question is why you give him a pass on all of it. Now let’s get to the part that actually matters.
He said he’d start lowering prices on day one. He didn’t say “elect me and I’ll be unable to do anything about high prices for the next 550 days because of Joe Biden.” That would’ve sounded ridiculous, right? Now imagine Gavin Newsom gets elected in 2028, and two years in, he hasn’t kept a single promise, and he’s still blaming trump for it. You’re nodding right now. Don’t lie to yourself.
He also said no new wars. That was a central promise of his entire campaign. He broke it anyway.
He didn’t bother getting approval from Congress, the people you elected specifically to be a check against a government that decides to do whatever it wants. Instead, he let Benjamin Netanyahu talk him into a war with Iran built on a plan that amounted to “shock and awe” and nothing else.
Shock and awe failed. Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, a weapon they’d never used before. Eighteen American soldiers are dead because of a war nobody asked for and Congress never approved. Gas, grocery, and utility prices went up as a direct result. His tariffs piled on top of that.
While all of that was happening, he personally made over two billion dollars off the presidency in under two years. His sons have Pentagon contracts now. He’s selling early access to his Truth Social posts for a hundred thousand dollars a pop, so whoever pays knows which stocks to buy before the rest of us find out.
Got a hundred grand lying around? Congratulations, you’ll profit. The rest of us are standing in the grocery aisle deciding what to put back.
The guy who promised to fix affordability is building a giant arch that will block the view of Arlington National Cemetery, where thousands of our fallen soldiers are buried. He thinks your tax dollars are better spent on a billion dollar ballroom than on your healthcare.
And now it’s come out that he’s withholding federal funding from states that didn’t vote for him, states whose residents pay the exact same taxes as everyone else. Imagine, just for one second, Obama or Biden doing that.
Let’s talk about him falling asleep in his own meetings. Is that the 80 years old talking? Is it from staying up all night posting on social media? Is it something medical? Genuinely, who knows. What we do know is he brags every fucking day about passing a basic cognitive test, like that’s some kind of achievement. That’s one small step above bragging that he didn’t wet the bed last night.
He says things that make no sense whatsoever, unless the goal is actively sabotaging his own party in the midterms.
“I love the inflation.”
“Affordability is a hoax.”
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
“I don’t want housing prices to go down. I want them to go up.”
If Joe Biden or Barack Obama had said even one of those sentences, you know exactly what would’ve happened. You’d have never let it go. So don’t pretend you would’ve given them a pass, because you and I both know you wouldn’t have.
So here’s my actual question. How many of the things I just listed do we need to look the other way on before we’re allowed to not have “TDS”? You don’t know, do you? You’ve never actually sat down and counted, because the label was never about a real threshold. It’s a deflection, the exact same species of nonsense as “fake news,” deployed the second you don’t like what’s being reported about him or about yourselves. It’s fingers in your ears going lalalala. It doesn’t change a single fact. It just makes you look like a fucking idiot, and it makes the rest of us start planning our lives around avoiding your bullshit entirely.
Because here’s the thing. Those people I described earlier? The guy fixated on his own daughter. The neighbor who stiffs his contractors. The coworker who steals credit and dodges blame. You hate those people too. Everybody does. We universally can’t stand people like that, because we know exactly how it feels to be stuck in a room with them.
The difference is you’ve decided the tradeoff is worth it. You’ve placed more value on what else he offers you than on any of that smallness, or any of the big stuff either.
Here’s the actual transaction. He gives you permission to hate people who are different from you, and that permission is worth more to you than honesty, than competence, than eighteen dead soldiers, than your own grocery bill. It’s why you’re fine with slavery quietly disappearing from school curriculums. It’s why qualified Black generals stop getting promoted. It’s why gay people are told to keep their lives behind closed doors again, and trans people get treated as a political punching bag instead of human beings. It’s why “illegals” get blamed for taking jobs that, let’s be honest, most Americans wouldn’t do themselves, picking fruit, working the fields, doing the manual labor nobody else lines up for.
trump lets you feel righteous about looking down on people. He gives your conscience a permission slip, because how bad can you really be if trump hates them too?
So yeah. If reacting like a sane person to a nonstop firehose of corruption, cruelty, and stupidity earns me a diagnosis, fine. It just means nobody gaslit me. Nobody brainwashed me. And nobody needed to invent a fake syndrome to explain why I can see exactly what’s happening.
Keep the label. I’ll wear it prouder than you wear that hat.
If you’re tired of the same tired deflections and you want writing that calls it exactly what it is, I need your help to keep doing this.
I’ve been losing subscribers, and I’ve been told the reason is that pieces like this one are “too divisive” or “too much profanity.” I’ve decided I don’t care anymore. Playing it safe hasn’t grown this newsletter, it’s shrunk it. So I’m writing the way I actually talk, and I need the readers who appreciate that to step up.
If this piece said what you’ve been thinking, become a paid subscriber today. If you can’t right now, share it with someone who needs to read it.
What’s the one thing on this list that MAGA would never tolerate from a Democrat?
Have you ever tried explaining this “double standard” to a MAGA friend or family member? How’d that go?
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