“What is it that affectionate parents require of their Children; for all their care, anxiety, and toil on their accounts? Only that they would be wise and virtuous, benevolent and kind.” —Abigail Adams (1783)
As families gather in the coming weeks to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, observances that should be a time of renewed family bonds, for too many, these gatherings will reveal some deeply fractured relationships for reasons that are rooted, astoundingly, in different political views.
Ten years ago, nobody could have predicted the onset of hysteric cognitive dissonance associated with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) or the consequences for family relationships. As I have noted, Donald Trump did not create the hate; he revealed it. Accordingly, his election revealed an endemic and metastatic strain of cognitive dissonance on the Left that, since his reelection, has manifested in, among other things, intractably broken family bonds.
This week, there was some MSM buzz about a case study of TDS and the resulting broken family relationships. You may recognize this delusional manifestation in those you know.
Molly McNearney, the 47-year-old wife of celebrity leftist Jimmy Kimmel and the executive producer and co-head writer of his show, demonstrated in great detail why she is the prototypical emotionally incontinent female that Demo Party strategists count on to win elections.
McNearney revealed that she comes from a conservative family and says she has cut off family members because they voted for Trump.
She insists: “It is, to me, it’s family values, and it’s really hard for me because I grew up believing in these Christian ideals of taking care of the sick and taking care of the poor, and I don’t see that happening with this Republican Party.” This is from a woman who aligns herself with a political party that has institutionalized systemic poverty and all its social and cultural degradations for generations.
McNearne laments, “I feel like I’m kind of in constant conflict and I’m angry all the time, which isn’t healthy at all. But I personalize everything now. When I see these terrible stories every day, I’m immediately mad at certain aunts, uncles, cousins who put him in power. And it’s really hard. … I hate that this has happened, you know? It feels silly. You know, part of me goes, ‘Don’t let politics get in the way.’ But to me, this isn’t politics. … I unfortunately … lost relationships with people in my family because of it.”
Sound like any family or friends you know?
If so, here’s how this mental health crisis unfolded.
There has been such a rapid and caustic surge to the left by Democrat Party socialists over the last five years that a now-historic polarity exists between those who advocate for American Liberty, especially people of faith, and those who advocate for statism and authoritarian government.
Democrat Party “progressives,” the current crazed cadre of Marxists/Fascists hiding behind the more palatable socialist façade, have spent the last decade promoting their hate and division politics, a playbook perfected during the four-year debacle of the Biden/Harris regime.
Consequently, a recent Pew Research report notes the current divide between Left and Right is rooted in the fact that Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on basic facts. Moreover, Americans are deeply concerned that this divide will cause increasing violence.
Indeed, the rise of leftist hate rhetoric being spewed by high-profile Demos and endlessly replayed by Leftmedia platforms has not only accelerated political polarity, but it has also inspired two assassination attempts against Trump and recent attempts against other conservatives. That rhetoric was directly responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk.
That polarity has resulted in what is now an epidemic of diagnosable mental illness on the Left, driving an underlying sense of fear.
Given the benefit (or detriment) of holding several graduate degrees, including one in psychology, back in 2018 I defined TDS as a form of hysteric cognitive dissonance: “TDS manifests in thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes resulting in dissociative behavioral and emotive expressions, which render the afflicted incapable of objective thought or critical evaluation, and subject to irrational fear of all people and things associated with Trump, to the extent they will abandon normative logic and reason, sever familial and fraternal relationships, and exhibit increasingly angry emotionally incontinent verbal and physical outbursts.”
At the time, some therapists adopted a kinder/gentler name for TDS, rebranding it as “Trump Anxiety Disorder” (TAD), a designer diagnosis for snowflakes and social justice warriors who fear a sociopolitical climate that does not comport with their safe-space value system. The symptoms generally include a sense of helplessness and lack of control, resulting in anxiety, confusion, and insomnia.
As for the new “kinder, gentler” TAD diagnosis, therapist Elisabeth LaMotte of the Washington, DC-based Counseling and Psychotherapy Center asserted that among her clients, there is a “collective anxiety” that has been elevating since Trump’s 2016 election. According to LaMotte, “There is a fear of the world ending. It’s very disorienting and constantly unsettling.”
But the underlying TDS/TAD symptoms predate the first election of Trump by at least a decade. As I described in “The Pathology of the Left”: “What, in the broadest terms, constitutes the difference between those on the Left and Right? Leftists tend to be dependents while those on the Right tend to be self-reliant. This is a reflection of their respective emotional constitutions.”
In other words, leftists tend to be far more insecure than conservatives, and thus, when constantly infused by Leftmedia talkingheads and scribes with apocalyptic narratives about Trump and his MAGA base, the result is anxiety and an array of dissociative behaviors. As McNearney said above, “When I see these terrible stories every day, I’m immediately mad.”
In a conversation with a friend last week, he said that every afternoon when he gets home, his TDS-afflicted wife, who is saturated with CNN, greets him with, “Did you hear what Trump did today?”
Recently, Elon Musk labeled a contributing factor for TDS, metastatic woke mind virus, which he described as “a very, very divisive identity politics … which divides people and makes them hate each other and hate themselves.”
Manhattan-based psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, in an interview this week, declared that TDS “is a profound pathology, and I would even go so far to call it the defining pathology of our time.”
Of his patients, he says: “It doesn’t take long for me to pick up on this: people are obsessed with Trump, they’re fixated, they’re hyper-fixated on Trump. And they talk about some of the features of this disorder — they can’t sleep, they feel traumatized by Mr. Trump, they feel restless. I had one patient who said she couldn’t enjoy a vacation because anytime she saw Trump in the news or on her device, she felt triggered. And Trump is the trigger for many of these people, and to be that fixated on a figure, on a person, it’s simply not healthy.”
That’s an understatement.
Alpert says, “Three-quarters of my patients will present with a lot of these symptoms and within probably five minutes of seeing me, their hatred for Trump comes up.”
More specifically, here’s how he put it in a recent Wall Street Journal article: “Clinically, the presentation aligns with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders: persistent intrusive thoughts, emotional dysregulation and impaired functioning. Patients describe sleepless nights, compulsive news checking and physical agitation. Many confess they can’t stop thinking about Donald Trump even when they try. Call it ‘obsessive political preoccupation’ — an obsessive-compulsive spectrum presentation in which a political figure becomes the focal point for intrusive thoughts, heightened arousal and compulsive monitoring.”
He concludes, “What once looked like outrage now presents as a fixation that distorts perception and consumes attention.”
Anyone you know exhibit these clinical symptoms?
Making matters more insurmountable, the most insecure of the TDS sufferers insist they are morally superior to grassroots Trump supporters whom they loathe. Thus, more than just the irrational fear of Trump, they actually harbor an underlying hatred for Trump supporters — which, of course, they would never acknowledge.
In a prior column, “Why They Hate Trump,” I highlighted a Wall Street Journal analysis by David Gelernter, a former national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and currently a science professor at Yale. He offered insights that are as instructive today as they were then.
Gelernter observed, “What the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America.” He summarized why Demos feared Trump: “He has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life. In short, he is a typical American…” Gelernter concludes: “Mr. Trump reminds us who the average American really is. Not the average male American, or the average white American. … This all leads to an important question — one that will be dismissed indignantly today, but not by historians in the long run: Is it possible to hate Donald Trump but not the average American?”
In stark contrast to all the hate being spewed by leftist politicos against Trump and his MAGA supporters stands Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who declared: “I know and I love people who voted for President Trump. They are NOT fascists, they’re NOT Nazis, they’re NOT trying to destroy the Constitution.” Who would have thought two years ago that Fetterman would become the sole peacemaker in his Demo tribe? And his tribe is not happy with Fetterman breaking ranks.
So, the question is: As families and friends gather for Thanksgiving and Christmas, how do we handle those who are besieged with chronic TDS?
The answer is simple.
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9).
In the spirit of Thanksgiving and Christmas, embrace those distressed family members. Love them. Show them grace. Keep the peace.
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Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776
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