For the last nine years, we have witnessed the evolution of the social pathology known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. Numerous memes have circulated on the web featuring TDS victims in various stages of the ailment, from the motor and verbal tics, more commonly associated with Tourette syndrome, to the violent behavior most widely associated with sociopathy.
As the frequency and intensity have not lessened in response to the Biden presidency, it is clear that simply removing Trump from office provided no palliative effect for many TDS victims. In the absence of any positive accomplishments and the presence of numerous policy failures, they continue to attribute all negative aspects of the current condition to Trump and use him as their pole star in analyzing any new events.
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As we approach the next presidential election, it is clear that another variant of this syndrome has appeared amongst the American electorate. Victims of this variant exhibit very different symptoms. These symptoms include the embrace of visual icons that imply that Trump is an agent of God, that Trump bears no responsibility for the mishandling of the pandemic, or that one’s purity is substantiated by having no history of criticizing Trump.
Examples include declaring oneself as holding an America First ideology thoroughly opposed to the Deep State™ while at the same time stating that one supports a strong military-industrial complex. Usually, the “-industrial complex” portion of that construct is not voiced as our current military-industrial complex is at the heart of the Deep State™.
While these two variants of TDS are related, they occur in very different sorts of people, and in my experience, they don’t co-occur in one person. How can we distinguish between them in casual conversation? Traditional English provides two prefixes that might prove helpful, although, in recent years, they have become abbreviations of other terms. Those prefixes are cis and trans. Prior to the current phase of the gender-culture wars, cis and trans were harmless words with simple definitions. Examples include trans-Atlantic, meaning the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, as compared with cis-Atlantic, meaning this is of the Atlantic Ocean, or transalpine, meaning across the Alps from Rome, as opposed to cisalpine, meaning on the side of the Alps closer to Rome.
Applying cis and trans to TDS gives us trans-TDS for the original variant, where Trump is viewed as other, and cis-TDS for the more recent variant., where Trump is viewed as one’s messiah. The best part of introducing this terminology is that it allows one to offend extremists on both sides of a contentious issue.
