Easy-to-take new test proves whether you have Trump Derangement Syndrome

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) afflicts all kinds of leftists - in particular the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson - but thanks to the BBC’s recent doctoring of a speech we can now detect it early, writes Tim Blair.

ABC presenter Sarah Ferguson isn’t what you’d call an impartial judge when it comes to US President Donald Trump – yet impartiality is exactly why we taxpayers give her lots of money. Seems a little unfair.

Credit to leftist media types, who have come up with a way to detect one of the modern world’s most debilitating medical conditions.

They’ve accidentally devised a test for Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS – a cruel and insidious mental illness that’s been destroying minds since 2015.

It is quite a breakthrough. After all, as medical experts will tell you, diagnosis is the first step towards a cure.

The test works like this. If you can look at the BBC’s wicked butchering of Donald Trump’s speech in Washington five years ago and see nothing obviously deeply wrong with it then you’ve got TDS.

Full-blown. Riddled with it. Like syphilis in medieval Europe.

Hey, why not take the test right now? Here are Trump’s unedited words as spoken to supporters on January 6, 2020, before that day’s Capitol building riot:

“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

Nothing wrong with that – which is no doubt why the anti-Trump BBC felt the need to change it.

US President Donald Trump has a hypnotic, disorientating effect on left wing journalists and commentators, which often leads to incurable TDS. Picture: Brendan Smialowski / AFP

Here’s how the BBC’s Panorama program presented Trump’s words, without informing viewers that their composition had been spliced together from three different parts of the President’s speech:

“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not gonna have a country any more.”

There you go. Pure insurrection venom, as crafted by the BBC.

Michael Prescott, then the independent adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, wrote in a subsequent explosive memo that the broadcaster had “materially misled viewers”.

“It was completely misleading to edit the clip in the way Panorama aired it,” said Prescott, whose memo led last week to the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness.

“The fact that (Trump) did not explicitly exhort supporters to go down and fight at Capitol Hill was one of the reasons there were no federal charges for incitement to riot.”

The BBC’s editorial adviser thought the editing was misleading.

The BBC’s director-general and head of news agreed, feeling so ashamed of it that they resigned.

But in Australia, at our ABC, 7.30 presenter Sarah Ferguson was not much bothered at all.

Describing the BBC’s cut ‘n’ slash hackwork as merely a “poor edit” of a “program about Donald Trump that went to air some time ago”, Ferguson declared that those huge changes “didn’t materially misrepresent the tone” of Trump’s speech.

Ferguson’s got the TDS. She’s got it bad. Tertiary.

Not that this is a serious leap from her previous level of Trump craziness, which included fronting anti-Trump ABC shows that featured their own seriously dodgy edits.

To our lady of the ABC, the question is not why the BBC lied to its big global audience about what Trump said. Instead – and I’ll use Ferguson’s exact words here, from last Tuesday’s 7.30 – she asked: “The question is why would that lead to the resignation of such a powerful figure” as BBC head of news Turness.

“In normal circumstances,” Ferguson said, “you would expect an apology.” And that’s all. Well, that may be how the ABC deals with its embarrassments, but even the trashy BBC has higher standards.

Despite the BBC admitting it had doctored Donald Trump’s speech in a way that made him look bad, ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson took a nothing to see here approach, describing it as merely a “poor edit”.

Having swept aside that damning indication of BBC bias, Ferguson was liberated to explore her own personal TDS-baked conspiracy theory.

“I understand we have heard that there was a dossier put together by someone at the BBC, looking at its impartiality,” she told her interviewee, the completely unbiased ancient leftie Guardian veteran Alan Rusbridger.

“Now, was that a legitimate piece of work? Who was behind it and what was the purpose of putting that information together before it was leaked …?”

Ferguson has got the entire BBC fake news story right in front of her, which at that time was only a day or so old.

She has got the clear evidence of spliced and distorted speech.

The twisted meaning.

The consequent top-level departures.

Yet Ferguson skips past all of that to focus instead on the whistleblower – to focus instead on someone who is actually holding the powerful to account.

You know, like a real journalist.

The poor lass. If Ferguson’s head was more infected with brain-dissolving Trump Derangement Syndrome than it already is, it would lose another 20 IQ points and have a red bandanna on top of it.

Originally published as Easy-to-take new test proves whether you have Trump Derangement Syndrome