On Wednesday afternoon, in a low-ceilinged fluorescent conference room at the National Press Club, a psychiatrist in a hot pink blazer advanced a truly quixotic aim: Dr. Carole Lieberman wants to make Trump Derangement Syndrome an officially recognized psychological illness, one that appears in the primary reference text of modern psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “You’re all laughing,” she acknowledged to the friendly but half-empty room. “Yes, that’s quite a task, right? Not something that the American Psychiatric Association might be expected to endorse.” Once the chief resident at Bellevue and a former student of Anna Freud, Lieberman now bills herself as “America’s psychiatrist,” dispensing psychologically inflected political commentary on cable news. (Gavin Newsom was “obviously traumatized as a young boy,” haven’t you heard?) According to her website, Lieberman is based in Beverly Hills, hosts the “Terrorist Therapist” podcast, and once stopped an ad for an action movie from appearing on the side of a rocket because she’s “appalled at America sending messages of violence into space.” “My definition of TDS,” Lieberman explained, “is an irrational, quasi-psychotic hatred of anything Trump, resulting in rage and over-the-top efforts to destroy him and his work.” Attacking Teslas was an example she gave. To further explain, she played a Fox News clip of Elon Musk suggesting that TDS sufferers act like they’ve been “shot with a dart in the jugular that contained, like, methamphetamine and rabies.” The dapper gentleman to my left—a White House correspondent for Newsmax—kept muttering “good stuff” under his breath. I have to be honest that I know and love some sufferers of TDS. When I use that term, here is what I mean: people who organize their intellectual and emotional lives around opposing Trump, the way that the devout organize the cosmos around God. People with TDS react to everything Trump does. They argue about who hates him more. In some cases, their algorithmic drift has somewhat unmoored them from reality, leading them to believe overblown rumors (say, of the President’s imminent demise) or to defend the indefensible on ideological grounds (see: “Joe Biden had a perfectly good debate”). I think they exist in a poisoned information environment with relatively low media literacy. I do not think they’re mentally ill. Lieberman disagrees. She calls TDS a “dangerous psychiatric epidemic threatening the mental health of Americans and the stability of the country.” It’s a hallmark of bad-faith arguments to attack your opponents ad hominem, which would seem to include calling them crazy—but according to her, TDS runs deeper than politics or values, and it’s “much more serious than just whether you like him or not.” As a “psychoanalytically oriented” thinker, she sees TDS as not actually being about the President at all: He simply triggers something primal in people that stems from “their relationship to authority figures when they were children.” By that logic, one might infer that when Robert De Niro speaks of Trump’s cruelty, he’s actually imagining the playground bullies of his youth, or that when John Kelly quit the White House, he did so because he had a mean dad. Perhaps every single Democrat in Congress voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act not because they believed it would hurt their constituents (it funded tax cuts for the megarich by slashing food aid and healthcare for the poor), but because of childhood wounds. This does seem, essentially, to be Lieberman’s belief—and it’s explicitly helpful to Trump. “They’ve got serious Trump Derangement, which actually is a disease,” the President recently said while attempting to discredit Democratic lawmakers. “I’m hearing it is actually a disease.” And where could Trump have heard that? I don’t know, but Lieberman sometimes speaks about it on TV. I thought about that flow of information while she stood before multiple TV cameras insisting that getting TDS into the DSM would benefit individuals and families and communities and the nation—that if the American Psychiatric Association would simply accept her ideas, then she could get TDS victims some help. In order for a mental illness to be added to the DSM, it needs a set of diagnostic criteria. At the lectern, Lieberman walked us through the official proposal that she plans to submit. A mild case of TDS, she said, includes “three or more of the following” symptoms, which must be “present for at least three months” and cause “significant distress or impairment”: “Obsession with Donald Trump and simmering anger towards anyone (even strangers) who might like him” “Reeling at the the mention of Trump’s name or songs associated with him—like ‘YMCA’ and ‘God Bless the USA’—with a need to speak up with criticisms and expletives” “Yelling or throwing something at the TV when Trump appears” “Stammering when asked what’s not to like about Trump and an inability to come up with anything that makes reasonable sense” “Incapacity to be able to state what policy is objectionable or why. Deflecting instead with statements like, ‘Oh, you know, he’s just awful!’” “Tenuous ability to function socially and hold conversations with Trump supporters without spontaneously combusting, despite one’s underlying outrage” “Expressing snarky hatred of Trump in TikTok rants, other social media posts, or public forums” For “moderate” and “severe” TDS, the criteria are similarly florid, ranging from “committing road rage upon seeing a Trump bumper sticker” to “a degree of obsession with Trump as a villain archetype that causes others to question one’s connection to reality” to “violent ideation with delusions of heroism or martyrdom in the name of saving democracy” to “quitting one’s job or leaving one’s family to be able to work full-time trying to stop Trump.” And to bring these symptoms to life, Lieberman invoked various celebrities. She warned that she has “not examined these people personally, so technically this cannot be considered a diagnosis”—but she suspects TDS in Jimmy Kimmel (who once said that reasonable people should have Trump Derangement Syndrome), Marjorie Taylor Greene (who claims to have “Trump Disappointment Syndrome”), George Conway (“one of the first examples of TDS causing divorce”), and Barack Obama (spelled “Barak” in the press packet) for implying that Trump’s penis might be small. Dan Rather may have a mild case for posting a fake Turkish proverb to Facebook. (“When a clown moves into a palace he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus.”) And Pope Leo may be a sufferer, too, as he apparently distracted from the President’s birthday celebrations by agreeing to an unrelated speaking engagement on that date. Most of these examples are absurd, but one felt chilling: Lieberman alleged that a sign of moderate TDS is “Prioritizing actions to protest against Trump, such as joining marches or writing op-eds against him.” In my notes, I jotted down some urgent questions: “Is attending a protest really a symptom of a mental disorder?” “Wouldn’t it be dangerous for democracy to recategorize political dissent as illness?” And, “Is that not exactly what authoritarians do?” To support her belief that Trump Derangement Syndrome is legitimate and pervasive, Lieberman commissioned a poll—the “first national poll examining public attitudes regarding TDS.” I wouldn’t blame you for wondering whether this was conducted by a legitimate pollster, but it was. She hired TIPP Insights, which got an A- rating from Nate Silver this year. According to the poll, Lieberman said, 54 percent of Americans are familiar with the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” 38 percent say they’ve personally experienced it, and 70 percent have observed signs of TDS in others. But when I looked at the handout from TIPP, I saw something odd: The poll defined TDS not as a mental illness, but as simply having “unusually intense negative emotional reactions to Donald Trump.” Hang on, I thought—the President’s entire communications strategy is to provoke bad feelings, to kick the outrage machine to keep everyone focused on him. The way TIPP worded the question seemed to be essentially testing whether this strategy works, the logical equivalent of asking if Americans know anyone who feels nauseous when exposed to ipecac syrup. Should anyone be surprised that large numbers of people said yes? Things got worse when the pollster himself took the lectern to explain the “very impactful” finding that 73 percent of voters believe that “negative feelings toward Donald Trump will influence how people you know vote in the upcoming election.” When he said that, I had to suppress a guffaw. Impactful how? In my understanding, it is the entire premise of democratic elections that you don’t vote for the candidates you don’t like. By this point, TDS seemed like a fatally squishy concept: It’s defined by anger at a person who’s deliberately making us angry. Its symptoms include some classic behaviors of a democratic electorate, like attending protests or voting for the candidate one prefers. It afflicts a broad and heterogeneous swath of Trump critics from Stephen King to Zohran Mamdani to Tucker Carlson to the pope. Lieberman’s entire framework was feeling less like psychiatry than astrology—and then we got to the “fun part” where she told us which populations are most vulnerable to TDS. At-risk men, Lieberman said, have low self-esteem. They see Trump as “the epitome of an alpha male,” and since it’s “hard to compete with that,” they blame him “for things that aren’t right in their life.” Female TDS victims tend to be “white, college-educated women” who “have had bad relationships with men.” They’re feminists. They project their anger onto Trump. In the wake of Trump’s victories, she claimed, some women “got a hysterectomy,” “convinced themselves that Trump hates women,” “broke up with or divorced their man,” and watched TikToks on “how to poison your man if the man was going to vote for Trump.” Lieberman did not mention a third group that, frankly, may be even likelier to be deranged by Trump: His supporters. I scribbled down a question about it in my notes. When the QA began, I thrust my hand into the air and held it there as my peers asked about the hypocrisy of No Kings protestors who want to pack the Supreme Court, or the parallels between TDS and liberal anger about Vietnam. Roger Stone’s ex-wife asked about media bias. And then the moderator—a Fox News correspondent who’d been referring to Lieberman as “the good doctor” throughout the event—finally called on me. “We’ve been talking about how negative feelings about Trump can cause irrational beliefs and even violent behavior,” I said into the mic. “But what about positive feelings about Trump causing irrational beliefs or violent behavior, like we saw on January 6? Is that Trump Derangement Syndrome, too?” “Well, we did have a question on the poll about ‘Trump Devotion Syndrome,’” Lieberman explained—this had not been mentioned before—“but the findings “weren’t super strong one way or the other.” Then the pollster cut in to say that actually, 62 percent of respondents said that they think it exists. Still holding the mic, I asked another question: “I’m curious how you differentiate between a values difference and a mental illness.” People who do not have TDS, Lieberman said, “can give logical reasons why they don’t like the President. They can talk about the policies or certain things that he did.” She pointed back to her diagnostic criteria—the very criteria that included attending protests and posting snarky things about Trump—claiming that she’s focused only on “illogical, quasi-psychotic” thought. “But can you just give a couple examples of what you’re talking about?” I pressed. “Of Democrats who have logical opposition as opposed to emotional opposition?” She replied, “I mean, I can’t off the top of my head.” Do I even have to say that this entire event made me extremely uneasy, that it all felt like an exercise in pathologizing the ordinary behaviors of a person’s political life? I had not expected the TDS presser to be intellectually airtight, but it was substantially worse than I thought. For hours, Lieberman stood before multiple TV cameramen arguing for the legitimacy of TDS while armchair-diagnosing celebrities and playing an AI-generated video in which “Doctor Trump” insists that the deranged can heal if they simply reject fake news and drink a Diet Coke. Faced with this spectacle, I could not help but wonder whether Lieberman’s goal might not actually be to convince the medical establishment to recognize TDS, but instead to audition for a position in the Trump administration. If that’s the case, Lieberman did not say so. At the end of the event, some staff distributed flutes of champagne, and the “good doctor” held hers aloft. She said she’d like to “toast to the likelihood—to the hope—of the American Psychiatric Association actually adopting this and you seeing it in the next DSM.” I did not drink the champagne. I left.The post Should Trump Derangement Syndrome Be an Official Mental Illness?  first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less