Trump Derangement Syndrome. Many types of cancer may be cured, but not TDS. Those contracting the progressive disease suffer years of misery as Trump lives rent-free in their heads before their inevitable, gruesome, end. The disease drives its victims to paranoid obsessions and dementia commonly manifesting in apocalyptic, absurd public pronouncements of impending national and global doom.  Other debilitating symptoms include dyschronometria—time distortion—a tendency to accuse others of impossible crimes and a compulsion to engage in wild logical fallacies. One unfortunate TDS sufferer is apparently presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who implies Trump is not only going to destroy “our democracy”—a primary TDS symptom—but Trump caused the Holocaust!

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said Saturday on MSNBC’s “American Voices” that former President Donald Trump intentionally uses language that “led to the Holocaust.” [skip]

Beschloss said, “Absolutely, and provide Hitler with an easy way to blame the many ills of Germany 1924 after World War I, one group which was Jewish people as well as some others but it was mainly Jews. And for Donald Trump as a former president and possible future president to use that language, knowing that that language led to the Holocaust, he knows what he’s doing, and he thinks it works.”

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.

Amazing. Considering Trump was born in June of 1946, that’s quite an accomplishment. So is being the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. That too—accusing others, particularly Donald Trump of being Hitler--is a primary TDS symptom. I’m unsure whether Beschloss has yet accused Ron DeSantis of being Hitler, but a variety of the terminally TDS afflicted have, so that base is covered.

I’m not a psychologist or physician, but Beschloss is obviously suffering from dyschronometria. It’s possible he’s referring to unspecified “that language” causing what many are reasonably calling the Second Holocaust, the October seventh Islamist attack on Israel. If so, that’s further and convincing diagnostic evidence of TDS. Hamas, bloodthirsty Islamist savages, certainly needed no verbal nudging from Donald Trump or anyone else to murder Jews, and Beschloss provides no specific information to indicate Trump had anything to say prior to October Seventh that could, in any logical universe, compel lunatic Islamists, who need no outside encouragement, to the slaughter of innocents. 

That’s another common TDS-related mental illness, the idea that civilization dare not strike back at the Islamist barbarians raping, mutilating, immolating, torturing and murdering them, because that will make them angry and produce future generations of raging, Islamist savages.

This leaves the inescapable conclusion and diagnosis Beschloss is in stage four TDS. Yet another TDS symptom allied with paranoid obsession is thinking others possessed of  supernatural powers.  Beschloss implies Donald Trump, not yet even a gleam in his father’s eye, was influencing events in Germany after WWI.  Obviously crackling with magical power, Trump, while not yet an embryo in utero, was somehow knowingly using “that language,” which “led to the holocaust,” and he projected that power across the Atlantic!  Trump’s powers are even more incredible when one considers the Holocaust was over before 1946 when Trump was born.

All people of good will must say a prayer for Beschloss and his family, but if even a tiny portion of his fantastic utterances are by chance true, and Donald Trump has those powers, that’s a selling point, not a bug, for his reelection.

Mike McDaniel is a classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor and retired police officer, high school and college English teacher.  His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.