MAGA Has Trump Devotion Syndrome

Our conservative friends and loved ones misapply the pejorative Trump Derangement Syndrome at our nation's peril.

MAGA uses the phrase Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) to reject evidence of Trump’s moral and political failings—asserting that the president’s critics are too blinded by hate to assess him fairly. It’s a rhetorical trick so powerful that Fox propagandists make sure to highlight it for their audiences, as Harris Faulkner did this week when she interviewed a psychotherapist about the TDS he was seeing in his practice.

But to believe that TDS exists, and is an irrational response, you have to be ignorant of a lot of factual information—like that Trump is the most corrupt president ever, or that he is regularly violating the Constitution, or that he is a violent sexual predator, or that he is extrajudicially murdering people in the Carribean.

Right wing media is a Trump protection racket. It keeps its audiences in the dark on Trump’s failings and works overtime to generate good will towards him.

• Fox News Puts a Very Heavy Thumb on the 2024 Scale By Burying Negative Trump News

• One America News was desperate for Trump’s approval. Here’s how it got it.

In reality, MAGA identifies with Trump so much that they are unable to assess him fairly. They suffer from a mass Trump Devotion Syndrome that interacts with their partisan identities in a way that walls them off from factual evidence about the world. And I’ve got the research to prove it.