Trump himself has diagnosed Trump Derangement Syndrome upon Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Chris Christie, Robert De Niro, Jimmy Kimmel, and Bill Maher.
Context
In 2015, during President Donald Trump’s first campaign, his supporters began using the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or “TDS” to describe his opponents, as a way of claiming their fears about him were highly exaggerated.
The term is also used about people who change a public policy stance with the apparent sole intention of opposing Trump. For example, surveys show Democrats were split 50/50 about a U.S.-Mexico border wall as recently as the early 2010s, but their opposition surged after Trump endorsed the concept.
The term was coined by columnist Esther Goldberg in an August 2015 column for the American Spectator, only two months after Trump declared his candidacy. Trump himself has used the phrase at least 90 times on Truth Social.
What the bill does
The Trump Derangement Syndrome Research Act would conduct an NIH (National Institutes of Health) study on the supposed mental disorder. The bill would fund the research through the existing NIH budget, rather than appropriating additional taxpayer money.
It was introduced in May by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH8).
What supporters say
Supporters argue that Trump Derangement Syndrome merits studying by the government, the way the government studies mental health conditions including autism, eating disorders, schizophrenia, and OCD.
“TDS has divided families, the country, and led to nationwide violence — including two assassination attempts on President Trump,” Rep. Davidson said in a press release. “Instead of funding ludicrous studies such as giving methamphetamine to cats or teaching monkeys to gamble for their drinking water, the NIH should use that funding to research issues that are relevant to the real world.”
Fact check: the NIH website does indeed include studies about giving meth to cats and teaching monkeys to gamble for their drinking water. (Though such examples represent an extremely small percentage of the agency’s total budget.)
What opponents say
Opponents counter that the same Republicans behind this bill hypocritically restrict NIH funding for “actual” public health issues that violate their policy beliefs, such as studies on gun violence or funding for pandemic preparedness.
Opponents also counter that the derangement actually runs in the opposite direction: namely, they say Trump’s opponents accurately reflect his dangers, but Trump himself exaggerates those of his opponents.
For example, amid Trump’s recent verbal attacks and legal fights against Harvard University, the college’s psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote a New York Times opinion column claiming Trump has “Harvard Derangement Syndrome.”
An attempted countermovement among Trump opponents attempts to reappropriate the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in reference to unsubstantiated political beliefs by Trump supporters, though this hasn’t caught on nearly as much as the original definition.
Minnesota’s similar state-level bill
In March, several state-level Minnesota Senate Republicans introduced a similar bill to officially classify Trump Derangement Syndrome as a mental illness.
“It’s a real thing,” state Sen. Eric Lucero (R) said on Minnesota’s right-wing show Northern Alliance Radio with Jack Tomczak. “There is a phenomenon out there of people that just go crazy at the invoking of Trump. It is a thing that I think we need to take seriously.”
Minnesota’s state Senate Democratic Leader Erin Murphy countered that the legislation “trivializes serious mental health issues” and declared it “possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history."
With the Minnesota state senate and governorship both controlled by Democrats, odds of passage are nil.
Odds of passage
So far, the congressional bill has attracted one Republican cosponsor: Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL1).
It awaits a potential vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, controlled by Republicans.
Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with the Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on the Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
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image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.