Republican state lawmakers are set to introduce a new bill proposing that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is officially defined as a mental illness.
Five Minnesota Senators are due to propose the legislation to the Health and Human Services committee on Monday, according to Fox 9.
The bill’s authors Eric Lucero, Steve Drazkowski, Nathan Wesenberg, Justin Eichorn, and Glenn H. Gruenhagen, described the faux “syndrome” as the “acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump.”
Symptoms include “Trump-induced general hysteria,” where a person struggles to distinguish between “legitimate policy” and “psychic pathology,” which is expressed with verbal hostility or acts of aggression against Trump and his MAGA supporters, according to the proposed legislation.
If passed, TDS could be added to a lengthy list of mental-health-related definitions in Minnesota. The “syndrome” is not recognized as a mental illness in any U.S. state.
Allies of Donald Trump, photographed in the Oval Office Sunday, have claimed the president’s critics have ‘Trump Derangment Syndrome’ (AP)
The bill is unlikely to be approved with Democrat-aligned parties having a one-seat advantage in the state senate.
Democrats were quick to condemn the new Minnesota Bill.
“This is why Minnesota Republicans have lost every statewide election in recent memory — every time they get an opportunity to try to improve Minnesotans’ lives, they instead double down on an agenda that caters to their party’s most extreme right-wing activists,” a Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party spokesperson told the Minnesota Star and Tribune.
The highly-politicized term was coined in Trump’s first term to dismiss criticism against him as liberal hysteria, suggesting that people abandon all logic and reason due to their dislike of the president.
The term “Derangement Syndrome” was first used more than a decade earlier in 2003 by the late political commentator Charles Krauthammer to describe critics of Republican President George W. Bush.
The Minnesota proposal pulls the same phrasing that Krauthammer used to describe “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” which was described as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.”
Trump supporters had revived the pejorative phrase while the president was campaigning for the 2024 election to mock and silence his critics.
Elon Musk again revived the term while speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity besides Donald Trump last month (Fox News)
In May 2024, former Trump attorney Alina Habba told Fox News that she believed the jurors in the president’s hush money criminal trial should have been sequestered over a holiday weekend to avoid them coming down with TDS and “forgetting all sense of reality.”
In October, Trump dismissed his former chief of staff John Kelly as having TDS after he branded the president a fascist and made damning claims about his views of Adolf Hitler.
Last month, Elon Musk revived the term and told Fox News host Sean Hannity he used to be “adored by the left” until they were infected with TDS.
The head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump’s government slashing force, added that when he mentioned the president’s name at a dinner party before his return to the White House, “it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained like methamphetamine and rabies.”
