#TrumpDerangementSyndrome : Do you have it?

Political editor, Dr Martin Hirst, confesses to a slight obsession with “The Donald”, but, he argues, it is not what you think.

I AM MILDLY OBSESSED with following the news of President Donald Trump. There’s part of my brain that still has trouble processing the fact that this low-rent reality TV “star” actually won the 2016 U.S. election. I really don’t think he could have done it without Russian help.

My fascination with Trump is borne out of my long and deep interest in politics and world affairs. It is impossible for me – a child of the Cold War – to ignore the historic role of the U.S. President as so-called “leader of the free world”. I know that this is an ideological trope that hides a century of imperialist aggression and mass slaughter (by the “fine people” on all sides), but it holds a certain truth because it is a boast backed up by the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear (and conventional) weapons of mass destruction.

Trump’s instability and his fat, little fingers hovering over the launch button should be grabbing the attention of most half-woke people. We are literally one Twitter meltdown away from Armageddon. However, I do not believe my dedication of serious thinking time to the Tangerine Fascist in the White House is a case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS).
What is TDS?

In mid-July the pro-Trump Fox News personality (I use that term loosely) “Judge” Jeanine Pirro was on Whoopi Goldberg’s TV chat show (Why, Whoopi, why?) and they got into a slanging match. In a widely-reported exchange, Pirro accused Goldberg of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.

What Pirro meant by this is that Goldberg’s criticism of Trump – which verges on visceral hatred like it does for many of us – is unwarranted and that inability to cope with the Trump presidency is a sign of mental illness.

This is the definition that you get from a quick check of the Urban Dictionary:

Trump Derangement Syndrome (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.

Symptoms for this condition can be very diverse, ranging from hysterical outbursts to a complete mental break. TDS can also often result in the sufferer exhibiting violent, homicidal, or even genocidal desires.

Sufferers have also been known to wish direct self-harm on themselves (such as increased taxes, a desire for an economic recession and even nuclear war), provided that an action might in some way hurt Donald Trump.

That the entry was written by a Trump fan, most likely dressed head-to-toe in MAGA merch (which is mostly made in China and Bangladesh, BTW), is not surprising — the term did start with the pro-Trump lobby back before the election.

USA! USA! *Made in China (Image via Wikipedia)

A New York-based real estate attorney named Stephen Meister is credited with coining “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in a Washington Examiner op-ed on 1 October 2015.

The column, simply headlined Trump Derangement Syndrome begins:

Bitter hatred is a dangerous emotion: It destroys one’s objectivity and judgment. When journalists become true haters, the results can be cringe-worthy. Presently, there seems to be a hate-induced epidemic sweeping the nation’s journalists — call it “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Infected pundits have been spewing idiotic, unsupported and intemperate opinions, even vulgar outbursts, about Donald Trump. Ironically, this is only helping The Donald.

You get the point. Meister is sympathetic to “The Donald” and, who knows, maybe they’ve done business or hung out.

Oh, what’s this?

As you know, I like to be thorough, so I checked out Mr Meister.

Here’s a sample of his earlier work for the Washington Examiner:

As an attorney who’s worked for Trump (I have not represented him for the past year and a half) — and many years ago, against him — his success on the campaign trail comes as no surprise: Trump’s a man of exceptional tenacity and guts, insightful intuitions, clear purposes, an intelligence that’s expressed forcefully and directly, always without regard to political correctness and a world class negotiator. Trump intuitively understands what troubles Americans and boldly states their concerns; I guarantee he’ll never be an appeaser of foreign governments; there’ll be no Neville Chamberlains or hapless apprentices for domestic or foreign policy, in his administration — if you’re not doing your job, you’ll be fired.

This piece, from a week before the TDS article, is headlined A personal assessment of Donald Trump, and this how it ends:

‘In a match up against Sanders, Clinton or Biden, the GOP is better off with Trump, whose business experience, successes and star power can overpower an ageing socialist, a corrupt dynastic politician, or the vice president of the most pathetic administration in modern history.’

As you might have guessed, the Washington Examiner is a very conservative and pro-Trump publication.

So, TDS has become a signal catch-cry for the Trumpsters and it allows them to vent and troll those of us who don’t swallow the party line parroted by Trump supporters.

It has also made its way to Australia thanks to the imitative behaviour of certain Newscorpse agitprop recyclers who ran out of original insults several election-cycles ago.

Luckily our good friend @thekennydevine was on hand to document it for those of us who are blocked by the best and brightest of the Murdoch hacks.

Australia has quite the panel of experts on Trump Derangement Syndrome…#brainstrust pic.twitter.com/yNhJ3z3qhH

— Kenny Devine (@TheKennyDevine) July 17, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

TDS has become a meme-worthy go-to deflection tactic for Trump supporters who hate the fact that some of us are willing to call out the President’s erratic behaviour. Behaviour that I have previously argued verges on potential mental illness or brain injury. It’s fair to say I believe that the Donald himself is possibly suffering from undiagnosed Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Reclaiming TDS for the sensible side of this debate

You know it’s time to address an issue when Trump tweets about it.

Australia has quite the panel of experts on Trump Derangement Syndrome…#brainstrust pic.twitter.com/yNhJ3z3qhH

— Kenny Devine (@TheKennyDevine) July 17, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

This tweet kick-started a wave of explainers in the news media that attempted to define and contextualise Trump’s tweet. The Daily Dot piece sets out the history of the “syndrome” in a calm fashion and points out that it has become weaponised by both Trump supporters and critics.

CNN got in on the act and re-upped an interesting piece from 2016 by Trump booster Justin Raimondo, which is still relevant, but not for the reasons Raimondo espoused two years ago.

In the first stage of the disease, victims lose all sense of proportion. The president-elect’s every tweet provokes a firestorm, as if 140 characters were all it took to change the world.

The mid-level stages of TDS have a profound effect on the victim’s vocabulary: Sufferers speak a distinctive language consisting solely of hyperbole.

As TDS progresses, the afflicted lose the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

FYI, Justin Raimondo runs a website called AntiWar.com, but it is a gaslighting operation that simply regurgitates pro-Trump and pro-Russia nonsense, such as this recent piece which attempts to equate Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager, Carter Page, with Julian Assange and to argue that they are ‘martyrs to the cause’. The “cause” is taking the plunge into the rabbit hole of “deep state” conspiracy theories.

Just take a second to reflect on Raimondo’s definition of TDS symptoms.

If you look at these three “symptoms” with a cool head, you can’t help but reach the (quite valid) conclusion that they more accurately describe Trump supporters who cling to the President like demented barnacles.

In other words, it is TDS that makes hardcore Trump supporters what they are.

Trump’s “deplorables” are willing to believe Trump’s obvious lies and to be willingly gaslighted and led by the nose and Trump himself is pouring fuel on this already raging dumpster fire.

Just this week, Trump’s ongoing campaign to confuse and corral his base moved to a new level. The President of the United States told his supporters not to believe anything they see or what they read in the news.

In other words, Trump told his supporters that they should only believe him and what he says. That he alone is capable of defining truth. This is a descent into Orwellian doublethink and echoes down through history as the favoured tactic of dictators who want to goad the faithful into mass hysteria and unquestioning loyalty to “the leader”.

This is also the point of Trump’s incessant tweeting about “witch hunts” and conspiracies to undermine his legitimacy.

It is unlikely that Trump himself believes that there is a conspiracy and he almost certainly knows (because he’s implicated) that the Mueller probe is a real threat to his continued occupancy of the White House. However, by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the investigation and constantly muddying the waters with chump bait, Trump hopes to deflect attention away from his own crimes and to mobilise the deplorables to defend him.

Beyond that, the desired effect is to make it so difficult for interested observers to get to the truth that they give up and stop looking. If the allegations of collusion and Russian interference can be reduced to a “he said, she said” back and forth, the truth and import gets lost and people switch off.

The other form of TDS is the one on display at Justin Raimondo’s AntiWar.com website. It is a delusion shared and fostered by some on the “libertarian”, “progressive” side that somehow, Hillary Clinton would have been (and still is) somehow worse than Trump.

I find this form of TDS intriguing because it is combined with a form of politics (Libertarianism) that objectively helps Trump, while subjectively claiming to be independent and challenging the left-right dichotomy.

The founders of Antiwar.com were active in the Libertarian Party during the 1970s; in 1983, we founded the Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee to work as a libertarian caucus within the GOP. Today, we are seeking to challenge the traditional politics of “Left” and “Right”.

The totalitarian liberals and social democrats of the West have unilaterally and arrogantly abolished national sovereignty and openly seek to overthrow all who would oppose their bid for global hegemony. They have made enemies of the patriots of all countries and it is time for those enemies to unite — or perish alone.

These two statements, in consecutive paragraphs on the AntiWar.com ‘About us’ page, are totally incompatible and simply highlight that conservative (anti-Left) nature of the site’s intent.

The ideology behind this politics – and made explicit at AntiWar.com – is disorienting to newcomers and ultimately politically sterile as a form of intervention.

In the end, it is just another form of Trump Derangement Syndrome and, like the hardcore of deplorables, those most infected are in denial about their condition. Perhaps TDS is related to Dunning-Kruger Effect too; certainly, it is one psychological diagnosis of Trump that appears to have some credibility.

In the past week, the mainstream media has made the reasonable link between Trump’s gaslighting operation and George Orwell’s 1984 in which the propaganda of Big Brother could be adjusted to ensure that the Inner Party was always in control of the narrative.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

—George Orwell https://t.co/OhqKrU0PBE

— David Priess (@DavidPriess) July 24, 2018

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Ensuring that his supporters – the real victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome – keep drinking the Kool-aid is a key strategic aim of the pro-Trump media and his top officials.

Everything else – inconvenient facts, actual truth, or contradictory narratives – is just shovelled into the memory hole to be burnt and erased from history.

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Trump’s Aussie friends are a bunch of deplorables

Given the US election result, you might be in the mood for a joke; it goes like this.

Set Up: Which one of Australia’s biggest media bullies who pretends to moral outrage at the use of profanities has just broken their own rules.

Punchline: Andrew Bolt.

Yep, Australia’s ‘most read’ columnist calumnist, who howls like an offended snowflake when anybody swears in his presence or anywhere near him, began his column on the Trump victory with this classic line:

DONALD Trump’s win is the biggest “f— you” to all his enemies — the media, the politicians and Wall Street.

Don’t be so coy, Andrew. A f—ing 12-year-old can read those dashes. Why pretend you don’t like dropping the F-bomb?

Bolt goes on to write that the ‘whole world’ and ‘our political class’ has been given ‘a shock and a warning’.

The shock is easy to register and now it’s had time to really sink in, we can begin to process the meaning of it: Donald J Trump, billionaire and reality TV ‘star’ is the 45^th President of the United States of America.

But what is this ‘warning’ that Dutchie is warning his readers about?

Stop bullying and patronising the silent majority or they will rise in terrible revolt.

It’s a pity that the worst types patronising bullies are often the last people to heed their own advice.

Like all good NewsCorpse writers, Bolt is wilfully blind to his own position in the media elite. He and they have to pretend that they are not part of the establishment, otherwise their wise words would just read like hypocrisy and cant.

Bush impeachment speech in Congress

Well, ain’t coincidence a wonderful thing.

I’ve copied this from somewhere else, but it’s interesting. I just finished the last post and then I saw this at After Downing Street.org:

Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2008-06-09 23:17.

• Impeachment

Congressman Dennis Kucinich is on the floor of the House of Representatives right now introducing 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush.

Yes, 35. He’ll be reading for a while.

Watch C-Span Now!

If you don’t have cable, go to a bar and tell them to put it on C-Span 1!

Or watch at the Video/Audio tab at
http://c-span.org

Take your laptop outside and turn the volume up!

More details coming later tonight!

Action in the House coming later this week!

Good websites to watch for updates and actions:
http://kucinich.us

http://democrats.com

http://afterdowningstreet.org

Let Justice roll down like waters in a mighty stream . . .

There’s going to be at least one article of impeachment that interests you and perhaps even mentions you. Watch for updates.

Unfortunately it seems that he’ll get off. Most Congressional Democrats are against it and Kucinich is an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, but a bit of an outsider in Democrat politics. Oh well, fun while it lasted.

Impeach Bush – isn’t that an oxymoron

No but the current US president is.

This is brief.

There’s a link at MSNBC.com to a straw poll where the question is:

Should President George W. Bush be impeached?

There’s only one obvious answer.

Yes, between the secret spying, the deceptions leading to war and more, there is plenty to justify putting him on trial.

So far, 5.28 pm in downtown Auckland, the vote is 89% in favour.

I like this response in the DIGG chatroom:

Where’s the “No because I think he should be hung just like Saddam was for his part in Iraq war crimes”?

I mean, if Bush can have Saddam hung for allowing his troops to torture prisoners in Iraq then why can’t the USA hang Bush for allowing his troops to do the same thing?

Roll on November.

Another case of American media self-censorship

Media Matters – ABC’s World News only network news broadcast to report on subpoenas for former Bush aides

This is a disturbing story. Only one American news network reported that two former aides to Dubya had been subpoenaed to appear before the House and Senate judiciary committee over allegations of corruption in the appointment and firing of federal prosecutors. The Bush White House is being protected from public scrutiny by the media watchdogs.

This is a good example of how the force of the so-called ‘Fourth Estate’ in journalism has been fundamentally weakened over the past 10 years or so. The traditional media watchdog role was to bark and bite at those in power who abused the trust of the citizenry. That’s the historic foundation of the Fourth Estate model.

Today the role of the Fourth Estate in most cases is to sit quietly at the master’s feet, licking its own scabby ar*e.

media ethics, journalism

American Media Wars over Iraq coverage

Media Matters – O’Reilly: CNN, MSNBC “delight in showing Iraqi violence” and “are actually helping the terrorists”

The American Fox Network – “fair and balanced”, yeah right – is well known for its patriotic support of Dubya and the American debacle in Iraq, but now the wonderful Bill O’Reilly has had a go at his colleagues on other networks over their Iraq coverage.

The fight was triggered by some research that Fox shows less footage of Iraq and covers less Iraq-related news than some of the other networks. This might come as a surprise to many, but the logic is quite simple: If your side’s losing the war, bury the news in other stuff and boost other news that puts your guys in a better light.

O’Reilly’s response was to blame the other networks for over-cooking the Iraq story and taking some delight in covering the war because it puts Bush in a bad light. When your light’s that sh*tty, it’s good to keep it out of sight under a big bushel barrel.

Here’s a sample of Bungle-Oh Bill’s reasoning:

Discussing the study during the June 12 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, O’Reilly claimed: “The terrorists are going to set off a bomb every day, because they know CNN and MSNBC are gonna put it on the air. That’s a strategy for the other side, the terrorist side. So I’m taking an argument that CNN and MSNBC are actually helping the terrorists by reporting useless explosions.” O’Reilly later stated: “I’m not gonna cover every bomb that goes off in Tikrit, because it’s meaningless.”

Yeah, meaningless in the context of the Bush regime’s total denial that it’s responsible — “now look at the mess you’ve gotten us into, George,” — for the daily horror of Baghdad and Tikrit. It’s the old “oxygen of publicity” argument, which I’ve never been that fond of.
It goes something like, the media’s responsible for terrorism because they give the terrorists what they want – the “oxygen” of publicity. This is based on the mistaken assumption that the terrorists don’t have any kind of legitimate political agenda, which the anti-imperialists in Iraq certainly do.

I admit that Islamic fundamentalism is a problem, it’s a politically-bankrupt ideology that cannot ultimately lead to the real liberation of Iraq, but I also work off the principle that a defeat for US imperialism — by any means necessary to paraphrase Malcolm X — is good for the planet as a whole.

We can deal with the Imams once Bush is out of the way.

Here’s some more of Malcolm. For the record, he was murdered by members of the Nation of Islam, he was not a deeply religious Muslim, he was killed because he had broken politically with Elijiah Mohammed:

“If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”
— Speech, Nov. 1963, New York City.

media ethics, journalism

The Myspace President

Obama in website battle with blogger

Well at least the phony American presidential election campaign period promises to be interesting. Last week I mentioned how Republican candidate John McCain had become a reluctant download star on the YouTube website. Now it seems that Democratic hopeful Barak Obama has got himself into a fight with a former fan.
Joe Anthony had set up a ‘tribute’ page for Barak on MySpace, but now the candidate has wrestled control away, with the help of the MySpace spat-sorters.
Mr Anthony was demanding tens of millions of dollars to hand over the site, but Barak’s team got it for free.
Nice one Mr Presidential-hopeful. You need the votes of the young and black Americans who hate George Bush, but you can’t keep your hands of the kids’ toys. Shame on you. A bit of trust would be a useful character trait for a controversial candidate. Now you just look like a suit from Sony.
Seriously though, if the US presidential campaign was based on popularity, in the same way as MySpace page rankings, some 12-year-old from Butte, Montana would be the perfect choice. She couldn’t do a worse job than the incumbent and the candidates are all looking greedy and ungrateful, just like in every other presidential election since… When? Well, way before the Vietnam war anyway.
Who was the last American president who wasn’t a rich, white and almost-dead male? Yep, tough question.

Ok, ok, I know you want to check out Barak’s pages. Just how cool can this guy get, click through here to find out.

media ethics, journalism

With friends like these

McCain Launches Candidacy With Bush Critique – New York Times

Ah, spring has sproinged in the northern hemisphere and eager-beaver presidential candidates in the USA are ramping up their phony election campaigns before the primaries kick off in fall.
It’s heartening to know that even Republican old boots like John McCain are campaigning against George “Dubya” Bush.
Let’s just hope it does them no good at all. They’re all tarred with the same brush.

media ethics, journalism