Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t Just a Meme, It’s a Real Thing

Way back in 2005, I went full-time as a writer/website owner. Over the last twenty years, there has been a lot more good than bad, but there was still definitely plenty of bad.

I’ve had death threats, hundreds of what I think of as quasi-death threats (Example: “Someone should cut your throat.”), attempts to get me fired from writing gigs, lawsuit threats, attempted doxxing, I was one of the early people cancelled by Twitter and Facebook, I’ve been the target of a New York Times hit piece, I’ve been the target of online mobs, I’ve spent large amounts of money on a website that I was building with a partner only to have them pull out, I’ve had public feuds with prominent conservatives, friends and allies ghosted me after Right Wing News closed and I could no longer do anything for them, I was fired by Townhall after complaining when they treated me like sh*t, I’ve had to deal with the fallout of employees committing plagiarism, and on and on it goes.

None of that was fun, but the only two things that ever really bothered me were an ad guy that stole money from me and the times when my website would crash and my tech guy and the hosting company would point the fingers at each other, refuse to work on it, and then I’d have to figure everything out and convince one or the other of them to fix it while I was losing money every minute it was down.

Still, you know what?

I felt like that was part of the price you had to pay to get anywhere in politics. I endured, and quite frankly, none of it ever upset me to the point where it caused a major disruption of my life.

Of course, you might be looking at that list and thinking, “Wow, I don’t see having to suffer through two terms of Bill Clinton, two terms of Barack Obama, and a term of Joe Biden on there. Didn’t that traumatize you?”

Oh, wait, no one is going to say that because conservatives may be unhappy with whoever is in the White House and want major changes, but we don’t need therapy because of who gets elected.

Now liberals? They can’t say the same thing. In fact, believe it or not, they are apparently SURGING INTO THERAPY over the fact that Donald Trump is President:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this therapist works in Manhattan, and he is seeing so many cases of this that he’s calling it “the defining pathology of our time.” That might seem like an exaggeration, but according to him, THREE QUARTERS OF HIS PATIENTS are suffering from being “traumatized,” “triggered,” and “fixated” on Donald Trump to the point where it’s interfering with their lives.

Incidentally, this therapist is not some weird rando. According to his about page, Jonathan Alpert has appeared on the Today Show, CNN, FOX, Good Morning America, and has clients like NutriBullet, Tempur-Pedic, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Liberty Mutual Insurance.

So, this is a real thing. Enormous numbers of liberals are having mental breakdowns over Trump being President. It’s apparently a problem in Texas, too:

Since Donald Trump retook the White House, crisis lines won’t stop ringing, clinicians’ calendars have been filled in like ballots, and long-term clients have eschewed unpacking domestic matters in favor of discussing the national news.

Stacy Speedlin Gonzalez, an addiction and trauma counselor with a PhD, is hiring two more providers at her San Antonio practice to meet new demand. She told me in mid-February that politics talk had recently consumed the entire biweekly meeting of her team of eight. Some of her clinicians had stopped following the news for their own mental health and were struggling to counsel those who remained terminally plugged in and eager to chat about it. She’s trained to explain to others how they can heal. But many of her clients, she told me, have “no real hope this time that anything can get better.”

Now, realistically, although liberals may disagree with Trump on everything, his election doesn’t have a huge impact on most of their lives. Sure, that may not be true if you’re an illegal alien, a government worker who got laid off, or a guy who wants to compete against women in sports, but all those categories still only describe a relatively small slice of liberalism. Furthermore, even if he does have a negative impact on your life, the rest of America had to endure a big increase in their healthcare bills because of Obamacare, so we’ve already been there without needing therapists.

Again, it’s understandable that liberals don’t like Trump, but why is it such a big issue that they need therapy over it? Certainly, you’re not going to see a lot of liberals concerned about the fate of their country, like patriotic conservatives are, so that’s not it. What’s freaking them out so much that they need therapy? Well, one professor in Rolling Stone speculated that it was “political grief”:

“The feeling that your worldview or political beliefs—what we think is right vs. wrong, or morally valid—is under attack. Political grief may also involve the fracturing of relationships as a result of ideological disagreements, or grappling with your identity if your values are at odds with the rest of your community. You may also be mourning your future safety.”

It’s easy to discount the opinion of a left-wing professor in Rolling Stone, but I think he’s on to something. Far too many liberals have an unhealthy obsession with politics. In other words, they’re not just interested in politics; they don’t just care about the outcomes; they’ve allowed their identities to get wrapped up in politics in an extremely unhealthy way.

They’re liberal, first, and foremost. They put it ahead of God, their families, their friends, and their profession. To them, Thanksgiving is an opportunity to push liberalism. A job is an opportunity to push liberalism. Church, if they go, is an opportunity to push liberalism. They believe that liberalism is de facto good, they’re good because they’re part of it, and that it comes before everything else. When the country elects someone like Donald Trump, who is despised by liberals and despises them right back, it can feel like a repudiation of who they are as human beings.

Now, you might say, “John, aren’t conservatives the same way?” Certainly, there may be SOME that are, but they’re a minority. For example, from me it goes God, family, friends, country, and conservatism, in that order. Conservatism matters, but when it has a setback, it’s not the end-all and be-all. A lot of liberals can’t say the same, and it’s a deeply unhealthy way of looking at the world, which is part of the reason so many liberals struggle with mental illness in the first place. What legendary coach Dean Smith said about winning basketball games is also true of politics:

Looking at life this way is a choice, but if you don’t do it, you shouldn’t be surprised if you end up talking to a therapist about how angry, upset, and triggered you are by whatever Trump did today.

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