Miranda Devine: Hating Trump is a certified psychological condition
Three years on from the US election, sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome are still seeking therapy — and driving the Democrats to self-harm, writes Miranda Devine.
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For a country that survived slavery, a civil war, the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War, and emerged stronger through adversity, America seems to be losing its mind over Trump Derangement Syndrome.
That’s the view from the New York Times, anyway, which is reporting on therapists who are overwhelmed with treating Trump-haters.
It’s “a chronic feeling that’s bordering on despair”, New York psychologist Karen Starr tells the newspaper.
“What’s going on in the government is so extreme that people who have no history of overwhelming psychological trauma still feel crazed by [Trump],” said another therapist.
It is a “psychic tax on the population” akin to “watching someone you love die of a wasting disease”, said another.
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Also known as “democracy grief”, TDS is “a mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike of Donald Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason,” according to the Urban Dictionary.
In fact, TDS is so pervasive that some therapists seem to be afflicted themselves. They find it difficult to advise their patients to get a grip since they share their dread about the Orange Man in the White House.
If Trump wins next year’s election, what will become of these poor people? After more than three years, they show no signs of wanting to be cured. Perhaps they derive masochistic pleasure out of their derangement. But their ferocious intransigence has driven the Democratic party to the edge of political hari-kari.
The impeachment gambit is tanking in national polls, especially among crucial independent voters and men, who oppose it 2:1. A record 91 per cent of Republican voters back the president, according to a Gallup poll.
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Meanwhile, Trump’s job approval rates have risen during the process.
Impeachment is “a very sad thing for our country, but it seems to be very good for me politically,” he gloated last week.
Meanwhile the economy is booming, wages are up, unemployment is near record lows and the stock market is at record highs.
As Democrats prepare to deliver a divisively partisan impeachment, Trump is delivering more economic good news with two historic trade deals in the works, one with Mexico and Canada, which will benefit US dairy farmers and auto workers. The other is a preliminary agreement with China guaranteeing the sale of $200 billion of US goods over the next two years, a quarter of which will be agricultural products.
On the weekend, the President was greeted by cheers and wild applause at the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, prompting a left-wing revenge hoax which claimed young military cadets in the crowd had been spotted making “white power” hand signals, which has led to an official inquiry.
Such is the punishment meted out to Trump supporters, who are regarded by TDS sufferers as racists and smelly Walmart shoppers.
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But despite their best efforts, the Democrats and their collaborators in the resistance media so far have succeeded only to unite Republican members of Congress around the President.
Even those who aren’t fans are disgusted by his unfair treatment by House Democrats whose boss, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, admitted last week they’ve been working on impeaching him for almost three years.
Democrats are the ones having trouble with unity, as those 31 representatives who won in Trump districts last year face an existential decision. Most will probably be bullied into voting for impeachment and there are reports Pelosi has been doling out electoral pork as rewards – how’s that for quid pro quo?
But one Democrat, New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew, reportedly is about to quit in protest and join the Republican party.
Trump, for his own part, continues to alienate half the country, with comic abuse tweets, for instance this week tweeting that Pelosi’s teeth were “falling out of her mouth”.
But as facts continue to emerge about the sinister FBI surveillance of his campaign, most recently in a report from the independent Inspector General of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, the country is starting to comprehend the extent of the dirty tricks waged against the President from Day One.
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Horowitz has driven the last nail into the coffin of the salacious Steele dossier, which was concocted by a former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Dossier is just a fancy French term for a ‘load of crap,’” White House spokesman Kellyanne Conway said.
A farrago of stories made up over beers or said in jest about “golden showers” and Trump cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow, the Steele dossier formed the basis of the officially discredited Russia-collusion hoax, which painted Trump as a Manchurian candidate who stole the presidency from Clinton with the help of his Russian handlers.
Trump’s election was a repudiation, not just of Clinton, but of elite progressive culture, and its obsession with identity politics, open borders, climate alarm and the whole globalist project, which is why a left in denial is so desperate to de-legitimise his presidency.
Impeachment is just the latest chapter in a desperate bid to undo the 2016 election.
The Democrats could have tried to defeat Trump in the usual way next November, by appealing to voters. Instead, in a bid to appease TDS sufferers, they’re throwing away their chance of winning.
Miranda Devine is in New York through 2020 to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph.