In 2016, something broke in the progressive psyche that has never been repaired.
It wasn't the election result itself; it was the revelation that the world did not, in fact, belong to them.
For eight years they had marinated in Obama-era certainty: same-sex marriage was the final boss of history, "hope and change" meant permanent Left-wing hegemony, and anyone who disagreed was a Neanderthal on the wrong side of the arc. The media, academia, Hollywood, and Big Tech all sang from the same hymn sheet. Dissent was not just wrong; it was unthinkable.
Then came Trump: crude, orange, and utterly indifferent to their sacred taboos.
He didn't just win; he won while laughing at their rules. And the sound of that laughter shattered millions of fragile minds like cheap glass.
What we call Trump Derangement Syndrome is not a reaction to policy. It is the death rattle of a generation of "adult children" that was never told "no."
The Pathology is Now Clinical
Therapists are burning out. Not from war trauma, not from childhood abuse, but from patients who cannot stop talking about a man who lives rent-free in their heads 24/7.
Jonathan Alpert, a Manhattan psychotherapist brave enough to speak the unspeakable, estimates 75 % of his clients are obsessed with Trump. They blame him for their divorces, their anxiety, their inability to sleep, their fear of the future. One patient told him: "I can't stop crying because Trump is president again."
These are not marginalised people. These are upper-middle-class, highly educated, coastal progressives who have every material advantage and zero perspective.
Alpert's diagnosis is brutal: "This is a profound pathology, and I would even go so far to call it the defining pathology of our time."
He's right. TDS is not political disagreement. It is the psychological collapse of people who discovered, in middle age, that reality does not bend to their feelings.
The Four Stages of Trump Derangement
1.Shock (2016): "How could 63 million people be so stupid?"
2.Denial (2017–2020): Russian collusion, impeachment, "mostly peaceful" riots — anything to avoid admitting they lost.
3.Rage (2021–2024): Lawfare, censorship, January 6 show trials, the full apparatus of the state weaponised to "stop him."
4.Meltdown (2025): He's back. The courts failed. The voters failed. Reality failed. The only thing left is to scream at the sky and pay a therapist $300 an hour to listen.
The Real Trigger: The Death of the Illusion of Control
The Left did not lose an election. They lost the illusion that history had a direction and it was inevitably theirs.
They were raised on a secular eschatology: progress is linear, the future is Left-wing, and anyone who resists is a dinosaur. Trump proved that history is a bar fight, not a victory parade.
That realization is unbearable for people whose entire identity was built on being "on the right side of history."
The Therapist Complicity
Here's the darkest part: many therapists are not treating TDS; they are feeding it.
The 2016 manifesto signed by 3,000 mental-health professionals declaring Trump a "threat to the well-being of the people we care for" was not a diagnosis. It was a political hit job masquerading as medicine.
They broke every rule of their profession: diagnosing a public figure they never examined, politicising the therapeutic space, and encouraging patients to externalise all their problems onto a single orange scapegoat.
Now those same therapists are shocked — shocked! — that their clients are having meltdowns when the scapegoat wins again.
You reap what you sow.
The Cure is Simple and Brutal
Grow up.
The world does not owe the Left a reality that flatters their ideology. Democracy is not a ratchet that only turns left. Half the country does not share their priors, and they never will.
Trump is not the cause of their anxiety. He is the mirror that showed them theiranxiety was always there, waiting for something to trigger it.
The adult response is not to smash the mirror. It is to look into it and ask: "Why does this man live in my head rent-free?"
The Silver Lining
Every meltdown is a data point proving that the progressive delusion of invincibility is dead.
The Left is not a majority. They never were. They just controlled the institutions long enough to pretend otherwise.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is the sound of that illusion dying in real time.
And honestly? It's the healthiest thing that's happened to Western politics in decades.
Let them scream. Let them cry. Let them pay therapists $300 an hour to be told that their feelings are valid.
The rest of us have a life to run.
And for the first time in a long time, the adults are back in charge. Countries like the UK and Australia will need to be shown how to grow up, politically, as Trump and Vance advocate.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-derangement-syndrome-real-and-its-driving-therapists-crazy