Trump Derangement Syndrome

Almost everything the Trump administration has done since coming into office on 20 January 2025 has ticked every box for the growth of an authoritarian state. Politicisation of the civil service, judiciary, military and academia, appointment of ideologically-compliant lickspittles to senior positions, threats against neighbouring countries, destabilising of international treaties and relationships, attacks on targeted communities and the press, even the banning of lists of words, have been the stuff of weeks – weeks, note; it is not yet two months as these words are written – since Trump re-entered the White House.

And the latest news so far is the introduction of the idea into the public domain of classifying opposition to Trump and his agenda as a mental illness. You would think that this proposed move should itself be included in the International Classification of Diseases 11^th Edition (ICD-11) of the World Health Organisation – but oh wait, hasn’t the US withdrawn (again) from WHO?

According to Newsweek, ‘Five Republican Minnesota state senators are set to introduce a bill tomorrow [17 March 2025] that would classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS), which they define as an “acute onset of paranoia” regarding the presidencies of Donald Trump, as a mental illness, according to state documents…Throughout his presidential campaigns, Trump and his top communication advisors – including current White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and communications director Steven Cheung – have repeatedly accused any critics of having a “severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome”, as Cheung previously told Newsweek. The phrase has also been used by Republican politicians and talk show hosts, among others. The bill seeking to classify TDS as a mental illness raises concerns about the politicization of mental health diagnoses, which could be used to misappropriate care, diminish other mental health concerns, and suppress dissent and political expression…’ (Newsweek 16 March 2025 https://www.newsweek.com/minnesota-senate-republicans-trump-derangement-syndrome-mental-illness-2045600)

Psikhushka is coming to America. ‘Psikhushka’ is a Russian slang term from the Soviet era describing psychiatric hospitals used as prisons for political dissenters. After all, who would be mad enough to oppose the Party? – for either you were mad to disagree with the obvious truths and purities of the Party line, or you were mad to oppose the behemoth of state oppression that could crush you by incarcerating you under the made-up diagnostic category of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’, defined as ‘delusions of reformism’ about ‘a struggle for truth and justice formed by personalities with a paranoid structure’ in the words of the KGB-dominated Serbsky Institute. The ‘cure’ for ‘sluggish schizophrenics’ included electric shocks, restraint, administration of insulin, tranquilisers, narcotics, and beatings.

One of the symptoms of insanity Soviet-style was ‘philosophical intoxication’, displayed by anyone who expressed opinions in opposition to Party dogma. ‘Dissemination of fabrications, agitation and propaganda which defame the Soviet system’ (to paraphrase the various iterations of the relevant articles of the Soviet Criminal Code from Stalin’s time onwards) was the catch-all for dissent. There were prisons and labour camps for sequestering ‘ideological criminals’ along with all other kinds of criminals, but to discredit the lunatic ideas of dissenters – you know: justice, democracy, human rights, that sort of thing – the dissenters had to be broken physically and mentally, forced to recant, to confess to incorrect thoughts – and for this ‘psychiatric treatment’ was the method of choice.

How limited and shallow is historical memory in the general mind! Not only do we have accounts by people who experienced Psikhushka such as Valery Tarsis’s Ward 7, Joseph Brodsky’s Gorbunov and Gorchakov, Tom Stoppard’s play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour based on the experiences of Russian human rights campaigner Vladimir Bukovsky who spent twelve years in Psikhushka and labour camps, but official public condemnations of the system by the World Psychiatric Association and a US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 1984 report among many, many others. And yet there in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ – how nauseatingly hollow these words now sound – the very same thing is being proposed. How has the US fallen so far, so rapidly?

It is true that one is driven mad by the encephalitic horrors of Trumpism, and it is because Trump and Trumpism are themselves paradigms of derangement, and busy deranging not just the US but the world. ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ applies to Trump and his epigones, not to those who oppose him. Quite literally, it is as if an enormous narcissistic insane blind baby has been handed a loaded Kalashnikov and is blasting off in every direction in a crowded room. Trump is a school massacre writ large – hugely large. Now we see, though we could well have predicted it, that a country with too much money, too many bombs, and an inadequate constitutional system (remember Frederick Douglass: ‘we should so arrange government that even if a bad man is in power we will be safe’) is a danger to everyone.

But wait a moment – perhaps there are aspects of the US constitutional system that might indeed, in the end, achieve Douglass’s wish. Trump is not getting quite everything to go his way. There are judges and courts in his path, and they are holding the line on some fronts. And it remains to be seen whether ‘the free and the brave’ will organise themselves and stand up to the precipitous collapse of the US into Soviet America. Trump has exposed the need for some major reform in the US system: urgent necessities are the electoral system (First Past the Post for the House of Representatives, embedding a deep two-party divide occupying all the political space; the unrepresentative, conservatism-perpetuating Senate), and Very, Very Big Money in politics – to say nothing of ending political appointment of the Supreme Court.

In sum and in short, for sanity in all our affairs there has indeed to be a cure for the current madness, in the form not of Trump Derangement Syndrome but of Deranged Trump Syndrome. History has vividly and painfully shown too many times over what happens if this kind of disease is left untreated.