#TDS
Only 1,375 days to go...
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” ~Voltaire
In 2016, when Trump ran for his first term I was in an email exchange with my MAGA cousin. His language, logic and attitudes baffled me. He was sending me emails explaining how genial Ronald Reagan, someone who had served as governor for the most populated state in the country for eight years had equal experience and credentials to be president to the obnoxious Donald Trump, a reality TV personality, who had bankrupted six companies. I failed to see the parallel, other than both of them had spent a fair amount of time in front of cameras.
My cousin’s emails were filled with abbreviations, statements and phrases I had never heard before. Some I had to even look up on Google to figure out what he was talking about.
The ones I remember:
MSM = mainstream media
“Deep State” = a body of people, typically influential members of government agencies or the military, believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy
Useful idiot - “a pejorative description of a person, suggesting that the person thinks they are fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions, and who does not realize they are being manipulated by the cause's leaders or by other political players. (This statement has traditionally been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, though this attribution seems to be a myth created by the anti-communists in the USA, as it's not supported by any evidence. The term useful idiot, for a foolish person whose views can be taken advantage of for political purposes, was used in a British periodical as early as 1864.)” (source: Wikipedia).
Since I consider myself logical and rational, I would try to discuss my opinion based on values/principles, data and facts. In reply, he would explain that all Democrats were communists destroying the country and I was nothing but a useful idiot by not supporting Trump.
Insulting me really didn’t lead to much, except silence on my part. What’s the point of a discussion without substance, principles or facts? And of course, he also said I suffered from TDS - another acronym I had to look up.
TDS = Trump Derangement Syndrome.
In case you don’t know, TDS is a disparaging term used to describe negative reactions to Trump that are perceived to be “irrational and to have little regard for Trump's actual policy positions.” The term is frequently used by Trump supporters to discredit criticism of him, as a way of reframing the discussion by suggesting that his opponents are incapable of accurately perceiving the world.
Shockingly (or perhaps not so shockingly) a bill seeking to classify TDS as a mental illness was introduced in the Minnesota Senate by Republicans in March 2025.
Well, I’d like to see a bill that introduces classifying TAS (Trump Amnesia Syndrome) as a mental illness. The 77M people that voted for him in November are indeed sufferers.
The 77M people voted for:
a convicted felon with 88 criminal indictments and 2 impeachments
a pathological liar
an adjudicated rapist
A sore loser, who refused to accept the outcome of an election, by attempting a coup
An utterly incompetent leader during a major pandemic, who added $7.8 trillion to the national debt and had the worst jobs numbers leaving office since Herbert Hoover
an authoritarian loving president who sided with dictators
a candidate who said his administration would be retribution and would include pardoning the convicted felons who attacked the capital
a candidate who consistently indicated that he loved inflation-generating tariffs
Need I say more? Amnesia.
My personal definition of TDS is “blind loyalty to an entitled, moronic sociopath, who could care less about you, your family, this country, and anything else but money, his ego, his cheeseburgers, his golf games, and your subserviency to his title/power.” It’s an affliction suffered by MAGA: Mass Affection for Grifters and Autocrats.
I have been opposed to Trump since the day he descended on the escalator in Trump Tower. Never-Trumpers have been called RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), socialists, communists, traitors, and, oh yes, sufferers of TDS. We have been marginalized and our opinions trivialized.
Now people are wondering, if just maybe, they might have made a mistake for voting for Trump. Right-wing influencer Richard Hanania is shocked and has some regrets:
“For those asking: yes, voting for Trump was a mistake. I thought we'd get a repeat of the first administration, but we didn't. The signs were there, I just did not take my own ideas about the awfulness of Trump and MAGA seriously enough…Nobody knew how bad.”
Nobody? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Liz Cheney knew and warned them:
“Donald Trump believes he will be immune for anything he does once he’s in office. He will not respect the rulings of our courts, and people have to realize our courts can’t enforce their own rulings. So if a president refuses to carry out his obligation to do so, then we are no longer a nation of laws. The people that stopped him from his worst desires last time around won’t serve again.”
Chris Christie knew and warned them:
“Trump has shown himself … to be completely self-centered, completely self-consumed, and doesn’t give a damn about the American people.”
John Bolton knew and warned them:
"Trump is unfit to be president. If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse. Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term.”
Lisa Murkowski knew and warned them:
“I certainly can’t get behind Donald Trump.”
John Kelly knew and warned them:
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.. it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.”
Adam Kinzinger knew and warned them:
“The malignancy of President Donald “Only I Can Fix It” Trump’s ego was revealed at almost every appearance, from his inaugural, where he spoke of “American carnage,” to his petulant last day in office, when he departed without acknowledging his successor.”
Mark Esper knew and warned them:
“The first year of the second Trump term will look more like the last year of the first Trump term. I think President Trump has learned, the key is getting people around you who will do your bidding, who will not push back, who will implement what you want to do. And I think he’s talked about that, his acolytes have talked about that, and I think loyalty will be the first litmus test.”
Jim Mattis knew and warned them:
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.” (June 2020)
Wilbur Ross knew and warned them:
“Trump is deadly serious about higher tariffs.”
Mark Milley knew and warned them:
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.”
Even James Madison warned them:
“The accumulation of all powers—legislative, executive and judiciary—in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
The list of people, who warned the nation of the danger of this man is pretty long… and yet, I have Republican friends, who were so convinced that Trump was better than Harris or any other Democrat, for that matter, that they voted for #FOTUS … amnesia.
Really? And we’re the crazy ones?
As we watch the destruction of our constitutional government, our economy, our relationships with our allies, our institutions and our very way of life because of this sociopath….
I beg to differ. As far as I’m concerned, they’re the ones with TDS — not me.
Thought for the day in honor of his birthday…
“I don't believe that the public knows what it wants…”
~ Charlie Chaplin
Must Read Articles:
A Lot About Trump Doesn’t Add Up
You have to give it to Donald Trump. The man is a marvel at multitasking.
In one sensational swoop, President Trump was able to set the global economy reeling, shatter our alliances, shred our standing in the world, tank consumer confidence, scupper the Kennedy Center and tart up the Oval Office, turning it into Caesars Palace on the Potomac.
And yet he still managed to find time to brag about winning his Jupiter golf club’s championship and sign an executive order relaxing restrictions on water pressure from shower heads — “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” the president cooed. He also ordered an investigation of an election security official he had fired four years ago for having the temerity to acknowledge that the 2020 election was not stolen…
… The former casino owner in the White House brags that he has never gambled. But he is gambling with Americans’ lives and futures. How strange, as even the dollar loses its allure, that a man long considered a branding savant has so badly mucked up the U.S. brand.
Why Did So Many People Delude Themselves About Trump?
It’s widely known that during his first term, the so-called adults in the room thwarted some of Trump’s most destructive whims. There have been far fewer such figures in the Trump sequel, resulting in the wholesale degradation of American governance. The conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer just directed a purge of the National Security Council. Thanks to Elon Musk’s haphazard cuts, employees who once worked to prevent the spread of diseases like Ebola are gone, as are nuclear safety experts. There’s no one in the executive branch willing to publicly push back on Trump’s threats to take over Canada. Somehow, traders failed to recognize that there would eventually be economic fallout from such profound misrule.
“The markets should have put two and two together that if you’re talking about annexing Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, you’re probably going to be more radical on trade as well.”
But Wall Street professionals, like so many other ostensibly smart people, refused to see Trump clearly, mistaking his skill as a demagogue for wisdom as a policymaker. “I don’t think this was foreseeable,” a mournful hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted on X. “I assumed economic rationality would be paramount.” What an odd assumption to make about a man who bankrupted casinos.
I Should Have Seen This Coming
Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful…
If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any institution or arrangement that might check the strongman’s power. The rule of law, domestic or international, restrains power, so it must be eviscerated. Inspectors general, judge advocate general officers, oversight mechanisms, and watchdog agencies are a potential restraint on power, so they must be fired or neutered. The truth itself is a restraint on power, so it must be abandoned. Lying becomes the language of the state.
"The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative — they were anti-left."
Quotes of the day:
“Many oligarchs continue to kiss Trump’s derriere while at the same time trying to signal to major investors that they’re sane. It’s tricky. ‘A willingness to adjust a strategy based on new facts and data is a sign of the strength of a leader,’ Bill Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, pirouetted on social media. ‘It is not an indication of weakness.’ No. It’s an indication of insanity.”
~ Robert Reich
“You want to believe that there must be intelligent and honest people somewhere inside the Trump economic policy trying to limit the damage ... but as with the existence of leprechauns, there is no empirical basis for this belief.”
~ David Frum
What I’m reading today…
Everything’s a joke until it isn’t. Everything is deadly serious yet not serious at all. There’s a method to this madness.
“If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”
~Steven Inskeep
Back in 2016, Salena Zito, a conservative writer and faithful chronicler of Trump—she later stood a few feet from him when a gunman attempted to assassinate him in Butler, Pennsylvania—argued that “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” This idea quickly went viral, entering the bloodstream of how many commentators thought about Trump, and it retains a certain plausibility even today…. But the events of the last few weeks show that it is just as big a mistake to dismiss Trump’s most outlandish statements as pure trolling. The most important difference between 2016 and now is that Trump has come back to the White House with a much more loyal staff and a much greater determination to turn his plans into reality. Across domains from foreign policy to immigration enforcement, that has translated into much more radical action than at the beginning of his first term in office. Over the last months, many pronouncements which initially seemed like hot air have turned out to be serious business.
Perhaps the most damning commentary about the US electorate and media is that Trump never even tried to conceal his malicious intentions and deranged policy positions. Despite some revisionist history from pundits and Trump voters with serious regrets, his second term is largely what his campaign promised. He was consistently fixated on personal grievance and revenge, with no serious solutions for the country’s problems, many of which were of his own making. That’s hardly the blueprint for an American Golden Age.
Almost exactly a year ago, Trump gave an extensive interview with Time Magazine that served as a detailed confession of his plot to ruin the country. The interview was conducted in April, months before he’d receive the Republican presidential nomination for a third time. His general election campaign was even more radical and divisive: He offered a dirty ashtray’s view of the future, with migrant fear-mongering, transphobic attacks, and outright threats against his enemies.
Trump is headed for trouble in other areas. His alleged financial expertise has proven to be a mirage. The world of economics turns out to be a complicated place; it’s hard to bully a market. Basic fact: A bond is a loan. Other countries, especially China, have loaned the US lots of money because we represented the strongest pillar of stability in the world. The tariff regime was instability squared. We were perceived as being less reliable. Other countries began selling US bonds. We were about to take an unexpected bath—unexpected by Trump, who seems to have gone through Wharton on snooze control.
The devious purpose behind MAGA's incessant lying
These lies are effective because they leverage anti-government sentiment and prejudice. They also work because opposition politicians struggle to recognize and call out fascist bad faith.
I worked for Donald Trump. This is the key to understanding him
Trump is more likely to win the Nobel Prize for literature than for peace. As with Ukraine, Trump listens primarily to himself, not to others. He creates his own world, this time an imaginary trade world, and then lives in it. Trump isn’t lying so much as he is ruling a parallel universe, like a boy’s tree house, where numbers mean what he says they mean. He doesn’t react well when the real world’s numbers don’t match: after all, who’s in charge here?
Trump can’t tell US friends from its enemies, either politico-militarily or economically, and doesn’t seem to care. What matters are Trump’s friends and enemies, which are manifestly not the same as the America’s.
How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin’s Russia
Seen through a different lens, though, the reorienting of America’s relationship with its imaginary twin is not about geopolitical maneuvering or the president’s personal proclivities. It’s about the improbable triumph of a set of ideas — political and cultural — that have been bubbling up on the American right for years…Whether he knew it or not when he began his campaign to defend traditional values in 2012, Putin was aligning himself with a small cadre of conservatives inside the United States who shared his disdain for modern liberalism. That common cause would become a genuine alliance.
Trump World Makes the Case Against Trump
Last November, Republican Representative Troy Nehls of Texas told reporters that “if Donald Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Period. Because Donald Trump is really never wrong.” …Trump’s choice to not just claim that tariffs work but actually implement them and cause a market crash has, however, subjected this faith to its greatest test. And so MAGA world is attempting to understand and even argue over Trump’s catastrophic decision making, while accepting Trump’s infallibility as a given. The most devoted Trump acolytes are dutifully insisting that the dismal stock market does not perturb them in the slightest…
Like so many Trump supporters, especially among the financial elite, he refused to believe that Trump would do the things he’d promised to do, precisely because they were so irrational, without pausing to ask if the very fact that Trump was promising to do crazy things was itself a reason to keep him out of power.
But why are we surprised? Trump is a true-believer who’s had a fetish for tariffs for decades — and his ignorance of global trade is profoundly 19th century. But the bizarre tariffs still came as a shock, especially to those in the business community who told themselves that surely Trump was merely bluffing; surely this pro-business president would not trash the economy; surely, he would listen to reason. Once again, though, they misread the man and the moment. They deluded themselves that they were dealing with a simulacrum of a conservative Republican. ~ Charlie Sykes
The Right’s Trump Derangement Syndrome
“Trump derangement syndrome” implies that if someone tells you something about Trump that you don’t want to hear, that person must be crazy.
But the real derangement lies in either the refusal or the inability to see Trump clearly. A few months ago, if people had predicted that Trump would cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine, destroy U.S.A.I.D., free all the Jan. 6 convicts, put his lackey Kash Patel in charge of the F.B.I. and turn us into a despised enemy of Canada, they’d have been accused of unhinged political hatred…
I’d argue that the doomsayers were also right about Trump’s first term, which was full of sadism, incompetence and corruption and culminated in a coup attempt. But if it wasn’t as catastrophic as it could have been, it was because establishment figures often restrained him. The periods of relative stability provided by the adults in the room lulled people into complacency about how much damage an unfettered Trump could do.
State tells employees to report on one another for ‘anti-Christian bias’
The Trump administration has ordered State Department employees to report on any instances of coworkers displaying “anti-Christian bias” as part of its effort to implement a sweeping new executive order on supporting employees of Christian faith working in the federal government.
Over the past couple of weeks, the administration has shown again and again that it truly has no idea what it’s doing. The Trump administration has been accidentally texting war plans; deporting a person it admits it had no legal reason to deport; and firing people it quickly realizes it needs back. If the start of Trump’s second presidency showed an unfamiliar ability to impose its will, the recent stretch has served as a reminder that Trump is Trump, his administration is not run by polished professionals, he hasn’t learned much since his first term, and there’s no master plan that’s going to save the country.
One of the recurring ideas of the first Trump administration was that he was finally becoming “presidential.” … By the end of 2020, pretty much no one appeared to buy into the notion…
Yet the idea that the president would willingly drive the country toward a likely recession is hard to believe. No wonder that some Very Serious People in finance spent the days leading up to April 2 seriously considering something referred to as the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” which sought to make sense of Trump’s actions but which my colleague Rogé Karma aptly labeled “QAnon for tariffs.”
“I Am Seeing My Community of Researchers Decimated”
“I can no longer, in good conscience, be a part of or lend any kind of support to what I see as increasingly strenuous efforts to comply with each and every immoral and often illegal directive being sent to the National Institutes of Health. . . . Compliance with these directives violates my own morals and ethics and regularly requires me to contemplate behaviors that violate both my Physician’s Professional Oath and my Oath of Federal Service. . . .
People are being systematically and deliberately excluded by the very entities that have sworn to care for them. Service to knowledge and to other people is being cast aside and replaced by service to a political agenda. Telling the truth is increasingly not permitted.”
~ Josh Fessel, a high-ranking director at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, one of the N.I.H.’s two dozen centers
Millions of those now alarmed by surging tariffs voted last year for Trump to return to the White House. They did this not because they wanted tariffs, but because they thought a second Trump presidency would mean fulfilling that most American of desires—the desire to get rich. Trump’s move has consolidated an anti-wealth political consensus that excludes these upwardly mobile voters. Which raises the question: Is either party brave enough to stand up for the aspirant middle?
…Belief in the importance of building wealth helped return Trump to the White House. Fed up with the inflation of the Biden years, voters backed the businessman who promised to slash regulation and bring an end to government overreach. That explains why, for instance, Trump won large majorities of voters concerned about the economy, voters shied away from Kamala Harris’s economic message, and a plurality of voters expected to be better off when Trump took office….Trump made major gains in large, immigrant-rich urban counties, where service-sector employment is dominant. These new, urban Trump voters were chiefly motivated by the cost of living and the ideological excesses of the cultural left, not dreams of restoring the Rust Belt to its former glory.
The Vibe Shifts Against the Right
When liberalism was firmly entrenched, its discontents could treat authoritarian ideas as interesting avant-garde provocations. Authoritarianism in power, however, was always going to be crude and stupid.
Trump’s tariffs have pushed some to the breaking point because they reveal the immediate material cost of that stupidity. The decadent cynics of the new right could dismiss Trump’s lies about the 2020 election as mere hyperbole. It’s harder to be sanguine about a collapse in one’s own net worth and economic prospects.
Why Wait Till 2028? We Need an Election Do-Over—Right Now
Less than 100 days into the second reign of Burger King, long live his name, we’re already careening from crisis to crisis. The government is a shambles. People are so fed up they actually went outside! Millions of them, walking around on a perfectly good Saturday afternoon. Does the rest of the world have any idea how difficult it is to get Americans to exercise?
A do-over isn’t the ideal solution. That would have been for America not to elect a sociopath. But now that we’re here, I much prefer a do-over to the various alternatives— general strikes, civil unrest, political violence and/or a military coup d’etat. Sure, the Constitution forbids it, but if we’ve learned anything over the last couple of months, it’s that half of the country doesn’t give a flying flick about that old ratty piece of parchment. Why should we?
A book I highly recommend…
Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman
From the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has defined Donald J. Trump's presidency like no other journalist, Confidence Man is a magnificent and disturbing reckoning that chronicles his life and its meaning from his rise in New York City to his tortured post-presidency.
What I am listening to…
The book that Peter Wehner recommends in this podcast: The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout
What I’m watching…
playing golf… again
What I read every day…
“Less than 100 days into the second reign of Burger King, long live his name, we’re already careening from crisis to crisis. The government is a shambles. People are so fed up they actually went outside! Millions of them, walking around on a perfectly good Saturday afternoon. Does the rest of the world have any idea how difficult it is to get Americans to exercise?” Love it! Nice piece.
It is the Trump supporters who are deranged