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“Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) isn’t a medical condition. It’s a rhetorical label for a recognizable pattern: Donald Trump becomes the organizing centre of political perception, so that every event is interpreted through him, and every interpretation is pulled toward maximal moral heat. Even people who agree on the facts can’t agree on the temperature, because the temperature is the point. Psychology writers describe it as a derogatory term for toxic, disproportionate reactions to Trump’s statements and actions.
And when politicians try to literalize it as a clinical diagnosis, it collapses into farce. It is fundamentally a political phenomenon, not a psychiatric one.
The useful question isn’t “Is Trump uniquely bad?” Reasonable people can say yes on qualities character, norms, rhetoric, policy, whatever. The useful question is: when does valid criticism become TDS? The answer is: when Trump stops being an object of analysis and becomes a gravity well.
What TDS looks like (beyond normal criticism)
Normal criticism is specific: this policy, this consequence, this evidence, this alternative. TDS is different in kind.
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Totalization: Trump isn’t a president with a platform; he’s a single-cause explanation for everything.
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Asymmetry: Similar behaviour in other leaders is background noise; in Trump it becomes existential threat (or, on the other side, heroic 4D chess).
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Incentive blindness: The critic’s emotional reward (“I signaled correctly”) overrides the duty to be precise.
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Predictable misreads: Even when Trump does something ordinary or mixed, it must be either apocalypse or genius.
This is why the term persists. It points generallyat a real cognitive trap: a personality-driven politics that makes judgment brittle. (It also gets used cynically to dismiss legitimate criticism; that’s part of the ecosystem, too.)
Why Canadian media amplifies it
Canada didn’t invent Trump fixation. But Canadian legacy media has strong reasons to keep Trump on the homepage. The reasons, in question, are not purely ideological.
1) Material proximity (it’s not “foreign news” in Canada).
When the U.S. president threatens tariffs, trade reprisals, or bilateral negotiations, Canadians feel it directly: jobs, prices, investment, and national policy all move. In Trump’s second term, Canadian economic and political life has repeatedly been forced to react to U.S. pressure: tariffs, trade disputes, and negotiations that shape Ottawa’s choices.
That creates a built-in news logic: Trump coverage is “domestic-adjacent,” not optional.
2) An attention model that rewards moral theatre.
Trump is an outrage engine. Outrage is a business model. Canadian mediais operating in a trust-and-revenue squeeze, and that squeeze selects for stories that reliably produce engagement. Commentators on Canada’s media crisis have argued that the Trump era intensified the trust spiral and the incentives toward heightened, adversarial framing.
3) Narrative convenience: Trump as a single, portable explanation.
Complex stories (housing, health systems, provincial-federal dysfunction) are hard. Trump is easy: one villain (or saviour), one emotional script, one endless drip of “breaking.” This is where amplification turns into distortion. A real cross-border policy dispute becomes a morality play; a complicated negotiation becomes a personality drama.
4) Coverage volume becomes self-justifying.
Once a newsroom commits, it has to keep feeding the lane it created. Tools that track Canadian legacy-media coverage of Trump-related economic conflict like tariffs for example, show how sustained and multi-outlet that attention can become.
The more space Trump occupies, the more “newsworthy” he becomes, because “everyone is talking about it” (including the newsroom).
None of this requires a conspiracy. It’s mostly incentive alignment: relevance + engagement + a simple narrative hook.
The cost: Canadians inherit America’s temperature
The predictable result is that Canadians import not just U.S. events, but U.S. emotional calibration.
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Canadian politics gets interpreted as a shadow-play of American factions.
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Domestic accountability weakens (“our problems are downstream of Trump / anti-Trump”).
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Readers get trained to react first and think second, a reinforcing heuristic, because that’s what the coverage rewards.
And it corrodes trust: if audiences can feel when coverage is performing emotional certainty rather than reporting reality, they stop believing the institution is trying to be fair.
A reader’s heuristic: the TDS check
If this is going to be useful (not tribal), it needs a diagnostic you can run on yourself and on coverage:
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Specificity test: Is the criticism about a policy and its consequences, or about Trump as a symbol?
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Symmetry test: Would you report/feel the same way if a different president did it?
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Proportionality test: Does the language match the evidence, or does it leap straight to existential claims?
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Update test: When new facts arrive, does the story change—or does the narrative stay fixed?
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Trade-off test: Are costs and alternatives discussed, or is “opposition” treated as sufficient analysis?
Pass those tests and you’re probably doing real criticism. Fail them repeatedly and you’re in the gravity well regardless of whether the content is rage or adoration.
The verdict
Trump is a legitimate target for strong criticism especially in a second term with direct consequences for Canada.
But the deeper media failure is not “being anti-Trump.” It’s outsourcing judgment to a narrative reflex: a system that selects for maximal heat, maximal frequency, and minimal precision. That’s how valid critique curdles into derangement—because it stops being about what happened, and becomes about what the story needs.
The fix is boring, which is why it’s rare: lower the temperature, raise the specificity, and let facts earn the conclusion.
Psychology Today — “The Paradox of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’” (Sep 5, 2024)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-meaningful-life/202409/the-paradox-of-trump-derangement-syndrome
The Loop (ECPR) — “Is ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ a genuine mental illness?” (Oct 13, 2025)
CBS News Minnesota — “Minnesota Senate Republicans’ bill to define ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ as mental illness…” (Mar 17, 2025)
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/trump-derangement-syndrome-minnesota-senate-republicans/
Reuters Institute — Digital News Report 2025: Canada (Jun 17, 2025)
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025/canada
The Trust Spiral (Tara Henley) — The state of media/trust dynamics (May 2024)
Reuters — “Trump puts 35% tariff on Canada…” (Jul 11, 2025)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-puts-35-tariff-canada-eyes-15-20-tariffs-others-2025-07-11/
Financial Times — “Canada scraps tech tax to advance trade talks with Donald Trump” (Jun 30, 2025)
https://www.ft.com/content/4cf98ada-7164-415d-95df-43609384a0e2
The Guardian — “White House says Canadian PM ‘caved’ to Trump demand to scrap tech tax” (Jun 30, 2025)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/30/canada-digital-services-tax-technology-giants-us-trade-talks
The Plakhov Group — Trade War: interactive visualizations of Canadian legacy-media coverage of Trump’s tariffs (Feb–Sep 2025 dataset)
https://www.theplakhovgroup.ca/detailed-briefs/trade-war-interactive-visualizations
The fascinating bit here is how easy it is for us to fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing “x”, when in reality we are doing “y”. In this study, all that was required to mirror the bias in our society against women was for a company to have a policy of meritocracy in place. Under the aegis of this policy people in the study tuned out their thoughts and considerations for actual fairness and stopped appraising their actions.
“When it came time to divvy up $1,000 in bonus money, there was a stark divide between participants in the meritocracy and non-meritocracy conditions. When the fictional company stressed fairness and individual performance, subjects gave men about 12 percent more than equally qualified women on average. When it didn’t mention a focus on merit, there was no significant difference between the bonus for men and women.
Though the experiment didn’t provide specific insights into the reasons for the different results, based on previous academic work, Castilla and Benard suggest that the variance might have to do with the participants’ confidence in their own judgement. In agreeing with the company’s meritocratic principles, they might have bolstered their sense of their own objectivity or felt they had established their “moral credentials” as non-prejudiced people.
“An organizational culture that prides itself on meritocracy may encourage bias by convincing managers that they themselves are unbiased, which in turn may discourage them from closely examining their own behaviors for signs of prejudice,” Castilla and Benard write.”
And there be the one of the problems with existing within a society that has normalized patriarchal standards. It is so very easy to forget that the very societal air we breathe comes with a implicit set of normative attitudes that, when not consciously opposed, take over. This is why not conforming to patriarchal expectations is tiring because feminists know that the ‘autopilot’ is complete trash and must always be on manual control.
Consider the Hollywood actor giving the classic “follow your dreams and never give up” line is bad advice and is pure survivorship bias at work. Well what is surviorship bias? Let’s take a look friends and learn. :)
“Survivorship bias, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may be actual people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further.
Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence (Correlation proves Causation). For example, if three of the five students with the best college grades went to the same high school, that can lead one to believe that the high school must offer an excellent education. This could be true, but the question cannot be answered without looking at the grades of all the other students from that high school, not just the ones who “survived” the top-five selection process.
Survivorship bias is a type of selection bias.”
“During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. Researchers from the Center for Naval Analyses had conducted a study of the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions, and had recommended that armor be added to the areas that showed the most damage. Wald noted that the study only considered the aircraft that had survived their missions—the bombers that had been shot down were not present for the damage assessment. The holes in the returning aircraft, then, represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still return home safely. Wald proposed that the Navy instead reinforce the areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, since those were the areas that, if hit, would cause the plane to be lost.[8][9]”
So, they said: the red dots are where bombers are most likely to be hit, so put some more armor on those parts to make the bombers more resilient. That looked like a logical conclusion, until Abraham Wald – a mathematician – started asking questions:
– how did you obtain that data?
– well, we looked at every bomber returning from a raid, marked the damages on the airframe on a sheet and collected the sheets from all allied air bases over months. What you see is the result of hundreds of those sheets.
– and your conclusion?
– well, the red dots are where the bombers were hit. So let’s enforce those parts because they are most exposed to enemy fire.
– no. the red dots are where a bomber can take a hit and return. The bombers that took a hit to the ailerons, the engines or the cockpit never made it home. That’s why they are absent in your data. The blank spots are exactly where you have to enforce the airframe, so those bombers can return.This is survivorship bias. You only see a subset of the outcomes. The ones that made it far enough to be visible. Look out for absence of data. Sometimes they tell a story of their own.
BTW: You can see the result of this research today. This is the exact reason the A-10 has the pilot sitting in a titanium armor bathtub and has it’s engines placed high and shielded.
If you want to think scientifically, ALWAYS ask what data was included in a conclusion. And ALWAYS ask what data was EXCLUDED when making a conclusion.
Americans force fed their concerns from the elites handbook need to see Liberal Viewers 101 guide to the economy or even just to get a sense of what is going wrong and how crazy it is to support people who are for “more of the same”.
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Mystro
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