Election 2024: It’s the Psychopathology, Stupid

The more President Trump threatens to win the election, the further into the realm of psychological disturbance some people will go.
Election 2024: It’s the Psychopathology, Stupid
Dozens of anti-Trump protesters gather in Times Square, New York, on July 26, 2017. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Roger L. Simon
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Commentary

The deeper we get into the 2024 presidential election, the more pathological, in the psychological sense, our society appears.

You could say this psychopathology comes from both sides, but in truth, most of it is from the left in the form of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which has gone from mere neurosis to full psychosis.

Those things used to be classifiable in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” published by the American Psychiatric Association, but that tome, revised every five to seven years, has been so politicized itself as to be useless.

Many therapists these days spend their 50-minute hours calming down patients sleepless from the specter of former President Donald Trump while reassuring them that President Joe Biden will be reelected.

Meanwhile, speaking of TDS, the effort to destroy President Trump—if not through incarceration then through bankruptcy cum the humiliation of selling his real estate—has doubled or quadrupled its pace, and all the more so since he appears to be leading in the swing states.

Forget Hitler. After all, the Israelis are so “mistreating” the “innocent” Gaza “civilians,” at least according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), that comparisons to Alois Schicklgruber are all but passé.

The real bête noir of Western civilization is President Trump. (Second place goes to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.)

“Why” is not the question.

When it comes to TDS, facts are the last thing that matter. It’s about feelings so deep that they approach the primordial. Just ask Letitia James, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, and the vast majority of the employees of mainstream media.

To call our society unhinged is an understatement. The legal system as originally conceived seems no longer to exist. Its current reason for being is to fine President Trump so many millions or billions of dollars that few of us can remember exactly how much it is without having to look it up, multiple times, just to make sure.

No one expresses that better than Mark Steyn, who has suffered financial retribution himself on a smaller, yet significant to mere mortals, scale for having the temerity to question the climate orthodoxy. He wrote the following on SteynOnline on March 19:
“Politics itself is meaningless: cable pundits and radio hosts can yak about polls and policies all they want, but Democrats are pre-litigating the election because they’re pretty confident it'll work for them. As I wrote a month ago, after (Democrat) Judge Engoron’s decision to fine the (Republican) presidential nominee close to half-a-billion dollars: ‘This Judge [Engoron] is taking it to a whole new level. It’s not very difficult, after all, to ramp up the judgment to a number it would be impossible to get a bond for.’

Justice Arthur Engoron’s decisions seem to come not from reasoned legal judgment but straight from the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls involuntary survival instincts.

We see this survival obsession across the culture as TDS moves from neurosis to psychosis.

The growing attack on the free speech that once defined our country is arguably one of the strongest manifestations of this illness.

Not surprisingly, we find this appearing in a recent analysis by CNN’s Oliver Darcy:
“Elon Musk is showing the world how radicalized he has become. The billionaire, one of the most consequential figures to walk the Earth, spent another weekend swimming in the right-wing fever swamps of X—a bad habit that was apparent when his interview with Don Lemon was released Monday morning. In the contentious interview, Musk equated moderating dangerous and appalling hate speech to ‘censorship,’ bashed the press for legitimate reporting, assailed DEI programs without supporting evidence, skewered advertisers who fled the X platform last year and yet again gave credence to the racist Great Replacement theory, among other things.”

Well, one man’s “dangerous and appalling hate speech” is another man’s truth. At least that’s the way our founders thought.

It wasn’t until the arrival of President Trump that this was ever really a question. The man has an uncomfortable habit, unlike most politicians, of saying exactly what he’s thinking, often with a humorous twist that clarifies his point.

To the likes of Mr. Darcy and his many allies, this is unconscionable. That makes the CNN analyst the marginally more literate equivalent of Justice Engoron.

The more President Trump threatens to win the election, the further into the realm of psychological disturbance these people will go.

Whether the economy would improve, whether public safety would be better, and whether the world would be more peaceful are all irrelevant to them.

The most rational part of their otherwise aberrant behavior is fear for their jobs. In cases such as Mr. Darcy’s and Justice Engoron’s, that too is irrelevant. Mr. Darcy would do fine, perhaps better than ever, as an opposition journalist, and Justice Engoron, like it or not, has a lifetime position that, despite the highly justifiable enmity of President Trump, is almost certain to be preserved.

All this and spring has barely arrived. As we plunge into summer, things are likely to heat up to extraordinary temperatures; not because of global warming, but through and because of this psychopathology.

Let’s hope they cool, at least somewhat, before reaching a boil.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Roger L. Simon
Roger L. Simon
Author
Prize-winning author and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Roger L. Simon’s latest of many books is “American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus from Blue States to Red States.”