On Trump Derangement Syndrome

The anthropology and psychology of an obsession.

Long before Covid arrived, I’d joked with friends that if President Trump discovered the cure for cancer, his detractors would rather forgo the treatment than acknowledge he’d done something of value for humanity. It’s probably an inevitable outcome of America’s two-party system that any president may become the object of hyperbolic loathing. In the nineties, Republicans obsessed about President Clinton’s faults, real and perceived. In 2003, the columnist and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer coined the expression Bush Derangement Syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.”

During the first presidency of Donald J. Trump this syndrome became so virulent that it created a strangely binary posture in public affairs. If Trump expressed even mild enthusiasm for a policy, person, or thing, his opposition automatically rejected it. To be sure, Trump often threw gasoline on the fire with his bombastic personal style and occasional buffoonery. The qualities that had once been viewed as showman’s schtick were widely deemed unacceptable in a US President. The court jester had become king, and it drove the lords and ladies at court mad.

As anthropologists and psychologists have long understood, humans are hyper social and tribal. Stanford Professor Rene Girard has pointed out that during times of stress and rivalry, we are inclined to ascribe blame not to a complex state of affairs, but to a particular person or group. Persistent problems and misfortunes build up negative psychic energy, which generates a collective yearning to destroy the person or persons on whom the blame is heaped. This process of scapegoating is amplified by what Professor Girard called mimesis—that is, imitation—the tendency to embrace an opinion or sentiment because everyone in a preferred group is embracing it. In trying to make sense of the world, we often look to those around us for cues to guide us in our perceptions and opinions.

With Trump’s reelection, we can expect to see Trump Derangement Syndrome reach a fever pitch, with large numbers of people suffering a mental breakdown akin to that of Commissioner Charles LaRousse Dreyfus in the Pink Panther series. Instead of ignoring or laughing at Inspector Clouseau’s foibles, Commissioner Dreyfus takes them personally. In his mind, Clouseau becomes inextricably linked with all of the folly and disasters that afflict humanity. As he sees it, everything that goes wrong in his life and in the city of Paris seem to originate in the actions of Clouseau. To add insult to injury, despite Clouseau’s spectacular bumbling and preposterous theories about major crime cases, he is often proven right, which deeply wounds Dreyfus’s vanity.

At the same time, Clouseau is strangely ineradicable. Dreyfus simply cannot get rid of him, and it drives the commissioner to distraction that culminates in him trying to destroy the world. The following compilation reveals Dreyfus’s nightmarish descent into Clouseau Derangement Syndrome.

With Trump Derangement Syndrome reaching its apotheosis, the mental health profession is likely to face an avalanche of patients who resemble Commissioner Dreyfus.