Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) both exemplifies and exacerbates the cultural maladies that drive our deeply divided public discourse. Too often, these divisions result in a loss of friends and damaging relationships with family members and colleagues. As significantly, the targeting of individuals for cancellation in the workplace and public square has also become commonplace.
This essay is being presented in two parts. The second part, which is scheduled to run next week, will identify the central socio-political drivers of TDS, and offers suggestions on how to counter TDS and prevent its recurrence.
TDS Defined and Described
The phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” borrows from a memorable and rather tongue-in-cheek column by the late Charles Krauthammer, published in December 2003, which coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” Krauthammer published that essay about eight months after the start of America’s post-9/11 war in Iraq. It cited far-fetched conspiracy theories about President Bush that were being circulated by pillars of the political and media establishment, like then-Presidential candidate Howard Dean’s speculation that Bush had received advance warning of the 9/11 attacks – but chose to do nothing, presumably to have an excuse to launch and profit from a “war for oil.”
Krauthammer defined Bush Derangement Syndrome as follows: “The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W. Bush.” Although Krauthammer’s 2003 column was written at least partly as satire, in 2025 the concept provides an all-too-accurate picture of the tsunami of fear and loathing that dominates public discourse about Donald Trump. This invites the question, what effect, if any, TDS has on our politics and/or culture.
Since its first emergence in 2016, TDS has been principally manifested in three distinct iterations, all grounded in the claim that Donald Trump presents an existential danger to American democracy and hence must be stopped by any means possible. The core iteration consists of a relentlessly disseminated ideological narrative that paints Trump as the equivalent of Adolph Hitler. Although in fact a grandiose exaggeration, this narrative drives the other two iterations of TDS. The second one consists of a far-reaching campaign of lawfare against Trump, carried out by public officials and often involving double standards of justice. The third iteration is manifested largely in non-governmental settings and involves the cutting off of friendships and efforts to shame or “cancel” dissenters from Trump-Is-Hitler orthodoxy.
Trump-Hitler comparisons are prolific across the mainstream media. The editorial boards of both the New York Times and the Washington Post have promoted the comparison, with headlines like “Amid Talk of Fascism, Trump’s Threats and Language Evoke a Grim Past,” and “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.” Prominent media figures pushing the Trump-Is-Hitler meme include the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, the Washington Posts’ Richard Cohen, CNN’s Dana Bash, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, NPR host Juanna Summers, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, and The Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts, Jr., to name just a few.
Leading Democratic politicians also promote the Trump-Is-Hitler meme. These include Joe Biden (claiming Trump “channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin”); Kamala Harris; (“Donald Trump . . . wants a military like Adolf Hitler . . . loyal to him, not our Constitution.”); Hillary Clinton (adding that if Trump is reelected, “I think it would be the end of our country as we know it”); Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz (claiming “a direct parallel” between a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden and a 1930s pro-Nazi rally at the same venue); and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (“Comparing the tactics of Donald Trump to Mussolini or Hitler is a very legitimate thing.”), again to name just a few.
Trump’s supporters also are often painted with the same extreme brush, either as outright Nazis, or as the kinds of people who bring Nazis to power. In 2018 MSNBC commentator Donny Deutsch denounced Trump voters as the equivalent of Nazi concentration camp guards: “If you vote for Trump then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border, like Nazis, going ‘you here, you here.’” In 2017 CNN Senior Writer John Blake vilified Trump voters as racists who enable evils like genocide and segregation.
[I]t’s the ordinary people – the voters who elected a reality TV star with a record of making racially insensitive comments, the people who move out of the neighborhood when people of color move in, the family members who ignore a relative’s anti-Semitism – who give these type of men room to operate . . . . That was the twisted formula that made the Holocaust and Rwanda possible and allowed Jim Crow segregation to survive . . . .
Nor is this ideological narrative limited to denunciation and name-calling. It also takes the form of extolling, and hence encouraging, scenarios of violence against Trump. This practice is especially favored among celebrities.
To cite just a few examples: In February 2016, comedian George Lopez posted on Twitter a cartoon displaying former Mexican president Vincente Fox holding up the decapitated head of Donald Trump, captioned “Make America Great Again.” That same month Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore said of Trump, “I don’t want to give him any more oxygen. . . I mean it literally. Somebody get me the pillow they used to kill [Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia and I’ll do it — I’ll do it!” After the 2016 election, rock star Marilyn Manson released a music video featuring a Trump-like figure in a suit and red tie lying “decapitated on a concrete floor, in a pool of his own blood.” During the January 2017 Women’s March on Washington, Madonna roused the crowd by confessing that she’d “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” In February 2017 actor Robert DeNiro boasted: “I would like to punch Trump in the face.” That same month rapper Big Sean released a song with lyrics about his killing Trump with an icepick. In May 2017 comedian Kathy Griffin published photos of herself “holding a fake bloody, decapitated Trump head” (Trump later tweeted, his then-ten-year-old son was “having a hard time” from seeing the images). Through Spring 2017, the NYC Public Theater staged a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar; the play cast Ceasar as a Trump look-alike, who is “stabbed to death by a band of angry Senators.”
Even Joe Biden joined the verbal stampede. Addressing students at the University of Miami in 2018, Biden claimed to have declined an invite to debate Trump, bragging that “I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.’”
This widespread verbalization of hatred and taunts of hoped-for violence against Trump returned in full force during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Some security experts believe this torrent of “‘public enemy’ rhetoric” did in fact place Trump “at higher risk of assassination than other former presidents . . . .” And indeed, during the campaign Trump came literally within an inch of a fatal shooting when a would-be assassin shot off part of his ear (and killed a rally attendee just behind Trump); and two months later Trump came within 500 yards of another armed assassin hiding in the bushes on a Trump golf course.
The Trump-Is-Hitler meme readily collapses upon close scrutiny. But its ardent embrace among influential government officials – including prosecutors in the justice system – feeds the second iteration of TDS, which consists of a far-reaching lawfare campaign against Trump. In sum, if Trump is Hitler, he must be stopped by all means possible – and if this requires that rules be broken, so be it, because otherwise Trump ends democracy.
The lawfare campaign against Trump first began in 2016 with the false “Russia collusion” allegation. Despite being thoroughly debunked, that impactful falsehood remains widely believed today among leading media and opinion influencers. It well illustrates the nature of TDS-driven lawfare.
As documented in depth by DOJ special counsel John Durham, during the 2016 Presidential campaign, the FBI rushed to open a so-called “full investigation” of the Trump campaign, based on unverified and uncorroborated claims that Trump was colluding with Russia to win the election and govern as a rogue Russian asset. Nicknamed the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, this very first step violated the FBI’s written investigative procedure manual, which calls for a less intrusive form of preliminary assessment upon receipt of unverified allegations.
Worse, in October 2016, the FBI applied to the federal national security court in Washington DC for a warrant to wiretap the communications of a Trump campaign operative. The FBI’s application was based upon unverified allegations from a questionable witness, compiled into the so-called “Steele dossier” – yet the FBI falsely assured the federal court under oath that the allegations had been verified. Relying on that false representation, the court issued the wiretap warrant. The court later scolded the FBI for the deficient warrant application, noting that it “frequent[ly] [contained] . . . representations made by FBI personnel [that] turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession . . . .”
This FBI malfeasance was especially egregious given that in July 2016 – three months before the false October 2016 wiretap application – U.S. intelligence services had obtained and conveyed to FBI leaders, information about “an alleged approval by Hillary Clinton . . . of a proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” Yet the FBI leadership failed to pass on this highly relevant and damning information to the Crossfire Hurricane investigative team – namely, that significant parts of the information used to launch and publicly pursue the investigation of Trump may have been – and indeed turned out to be – fabricated by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Moreover, the FBI in this same time frame obtained incriminating information about illegal acts by Hillary Clinton but delayed opening any investigation. Specifically, the FBI learned in September 2016 that thousands of e-mails that had gone missing from Hillary Clinton’s home e-mail server – onto which Clinton had illegally routed classified State Department e-mails – now had turned up on the laptop of Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was married to Clinton’s chief personal assistant, Huma Abedin. Nonetheless, the “FBI . . . did not act for over a month to pursue legal process to review thousands of missing Clinton e-mails found on Weiner’s laptop.” In sum, per author and ex-federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy: “Obama’s law-enforcement agencies . . . tanked a criminal case on which [Clinton] should have been indicted.”
Also in that time frame, the FBI and senior DOJ prosecutors slow-walked action upon information it had received about possible illegalities by the Clinton Foundation, which allegedly took in millions of dollars in foreign government donations during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. As the Durham Report notes, “both senior FBI and [Justice] Department officials placed restrictions on how those matters were to be handled, such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.”
In sum, the Durham Report documents that the FBI applied a flagrant double standard for handling criminal allegations about Trump versus those about Clinton: “the immediate opening of Crossfire Hurricane as a full investigation contrasts with the care taken in connection with the investigation of the Clinton Foundation and other matters.” That double standard closely correlates with a TDS mindset conspicuously displayed by the pertinent FBI leadership in their private communications. Text messages from that time between Peter Strzok, the FBI agent supervising Crossfire Hurricane, and his paramour Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, included the following:
Page: Trump is “not ever going to become president, right? Right?”
Strzok: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
. . .
Page: [Commenting on news article about Trump’s fumbling to understand Russia’s annexation of Crimea]: “Jesus. You should read this. And Trump should go F himself.”
Strzok: [After saying he liked the article]: “And F Trump.”
. . .
Strzok: “God Hillary should win 100,000,000-0.”
. . .
Page: “God trump is a loathsome human.”
This was not the only instance of DOJ applying different standards of prosecution for Trump versus Clinton. In 2023, Trump was indicted for retaining classified documents in his home after leaving office and not turning them over to federal officials when asked. Yet the Justice Department and FBI had previously declined to prosecute Hillary Clinton for unlawfully routing classified documents to and through an unsecured home e-mail server, despite the fact that she and her advisors had aggressively smashed and erased evidence sought by DOJ’s investigators – to the extent of using “hammers and a software program called BleachBit to destroy some of her devices and delete her emails.”
This pattern continued throughout the Biden presidency, as DOJ collaborated with state prosecutors in both New York and Georgia to plan and bring forth yet more state and federal criminal indictments of Trump. Again, all this happened while DOJ declined to charge both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden for each of their unlawful possessions of classified documents, and despite the Clinton Foundation’s having pocketed millions in foreign government “donations” during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. Notably, that pattern aligns precisely with the TDS mindset displayed by both Crossfire Hurricane’s lead agent and his FBI attorney partner.
The third iteration of TDS involves Trump opponents cutting off friendships and seeking to shame or “cancel” those who dissent from Trump-Is-Hitler orthodoxy. Even as early as Spring 2016, left-leaning journalists were pressing views like this headline from Slate, that “It’s OK to End Friendships Over Trump.” Tellingly, the left’s passionate embrace of “diversity” vanished with respect to this difference in political views. A writer for the left-leaning Daily Kos celebrated the fact that “[m]any people are breaking their ties with their MAGA-voting friends and family,” and vilified Trump voters with this profanity-laced screed:
Let’s admit that they are a cult. . . . They argue that they voted for “Policy over Personality” – but we all know that’s a crock of shit. . . .
The question is – should we cut them off totally for having done it? . . .
If you can’t stomach the idea of interacting with someone who has knowingly enabled fascism, sexism and racism – then you may have your answer.
Importantly, this was and is no isolated phenomenon. A 2017 Pew Poll found that “47 percent of liberal Democrats said their relationships would be strained if they found out a friend backed Trump.” Even among conservative and moderate Democrats, 25 percent said that “a friend backing Trump would hurt their friendship.” But Republicans were far less likely to respond in kind: just 13 percent said that a friend’s voting for Hillary Clinton “would strain their friendship.” Seven years later, a more informal survey found that “60% of people polled say friendships with Trump voters [are] now impossible or iffy.” A sampling of explanations from those “No-Trump-Friends” voters echo the grandiose vilifications of the Daily Kos journalist quoted above:
- “Can’t be friends who support someone as vile as Trump.”
- “They are comfortable with policies that would destroy me and people I love.”
- “Trump . . . . is a felon, a rapist, a racist, and hates women. . . . [T]hose who voted for him share the same values, which are NOT mine.”
The asymmetric statistics cited above reflect a broader trend that has been validated by survey data, namely: contemporary liberals display a level of political intolerance about 300 percent greater than that of conservatives. A 2016 poll found that “28 percent of liberals surveyed said they removed someone from their social media circle because of the content that person posted, compared with 8 percent of conservatives.” A similar imbalance turned up using political party identifiers: “24 percent of Democrats distanced themselves from people on social media because of a political posting. Nine percent of both Republicans and independents reported doing the same to those in social media circles.”
Regarding all these three manifestations of TDS, they share two common features: first, they exhibit substantial departures from accepted norms of conduct; and second, they reflect the paramount goals of destroying Trump and delegitimizing his supporters. Both the transgressing of norms and the urge to destroy are driven by the extreme public depictions of Trump that dominate both the media and political discourse. As summarized above: Trump is Hitler; he must be stopped by all means possible; and if this requires that rules be broken, so be it, because otherwise Trump ends democracy.
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of accomplished historians, political analysts, and prosecutors who actually view Trump as a Hitler equivalent, and hence who regard the hate rhetoric, the lawfare, and the de-friending as eminently rational responses to who and what Trump actually is. The central question therefore comes down to this: Are they correct that Trump is Hitler? Or is that assessment fundamentally at odds with reality?
TDS Debunked: No, Trump is Not Hitler
A look at the actual historical record reveals the melodramatic grandiosity of equating Trump with Hitler. Consider Hiter’s most prominent spheres of action as Germany’s dictator, that is, regarding the economy, war and peace, and treatment of Jews: (1) he expanded government control over the German economy; (2) he launched a world war in which at least 15 million died in battle; and (3) He rounded up and mass murdered six million European Jews in one of the world’s largest genocides. Now consider Trump’s record in those same public policy arenas: (1) he loosened regulatory control over the economy; (2) he pursued peace through a negotiated end to the Afghan war, by achieving the first warm peace between Israel and Arab countries, and from muscular action to deter Iran’s covert war for Mideast hegemony; and (3) he strengthened America’s alliance with Israel and bolstered civil rights enforcement for Jewish students at American colleges. In sum, for three of the most impactful fields of public policy pertinent to the comparison at issue, Trump wasn’t just “not Hitler” – he was the exact opposite!
However, proponents of the Trump-Is-Hitler meme reply, “But election denial! And January 6!” This argument often cites Germany’s 1933 Reichstag fire, wherein arsonists burnt down the country’s national legislative building, which the Nazis used as a pretext to pass emergency decrees that shredded the German constitution. Again, the analogy is greatly exaggerated. For regardless of whether there were election irregularities in 2020, and however one regards Trump’s election fraud claims, neither those claims nor the protest/riot of January 6 approaches anything like a fascist Hitlerian coup attempt.
First, if denying the validity of a national election count is Hitlerian, then Trump has plentiful Democratic company in the Nazi dressing room. In 2016 Hillary Clinton claimed that Trump fraudulently won that election by colluding with Vladimir Putin and Russian operatives, and for years thereafter called Trump “an illegitimate president.” When Congress met in January 2017 to certify Trump’s victory, twelve Democrats rose to object, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi later said she supported the dozen dissenters, specifically alleging “voter suppression . . . [and] Russian influence . . . .” Yet denunciations of “election denial,” which were so widespread in 2021, were nowhere to be heard amid the election denials of 2017. This double standard is especially damning, given that Hillary Clinton’s “Russia collusion” claim turned out to be an utter fabrication, which her campaign minions then used to weaponize America’s national security agencies into a needless and damaging multi-million dollar special counsel investigation. It invites the question, who really posed a threat to democratic elections?
Second, because the 2020 “COVID election” involved an unprecedented shift toward mass-mailing of absentee ballots, concerns of voting integrity were actually rendered more salient in that year’s balloting. As noted in a May 2020 headline on CNN – by no means a Trump-friendly platform – “coronavirus puts the integrity of the 2020 election at risk.” Far more so than in other national elections, questions of possible voter fraud warranted sober consideration, rather than being scorned and shunned as mere “election denial.” All the more so given the fact that the United States is an outlier among developed countries, both in its broad exceptions to in-person voting and its lack of voter ID laws.
Perhaps most importantly, the pertinent evidence demonstrates that Trump’s actual intent for January 6 was a non-violent protest, as he had anticipated the possibility of violence and proactively sought to prevent it – but was thwarted in that effort. Per sworn testimony of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato before the Congressional January 6 Committee, “Trump had suggested 10,000 [National Guard troops] would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6.” Ornato also testified that he witnessed “White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city,” specifically offering up to 10,000 – but that Mayor Bowser declined the offer, instead requesting just 350 guardsmen to assist with traffic control.
Ornato’s account was corroborated by sworn testimony from the Pentagon’s then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley. Milley testified that on January 3, 2021, Trump ordered, “There’s going to be a large amount of protestors here on the 6th, make sure you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.” And then Trump reiterated, “Hey, I don’t care if you use Guard, or Soldiers, active duty Soldiers, do whatever you have to do. Just make sure it’s safe.” Milley’s account is especially credible, given his utter lack of motive to protect or exonerate Trump. On the contrary, Milley has made abundantly clear that he detests Trump, having once described him as “fascist to the core.”
These accounts are further corroborated by then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who reported that as protestors converged on the Capitol, he also requested National Guard support from the Pentagon, but that his urgent request was denied by the Director of Army Staff, who explained “I don’t like the visual of the National Guard standing a police line with the Capitol in the background.”
Trump’s record, notwithstanding its several controversies, falls well short of replicating a Hitlerian dictatorship. Yet some still defend the Trump-Hitler equation based less on what Trump does than on what he says and how he says it. And to be fair, Trump’s rhetoric is far less filtered than that of most politicians and is especially un-Presidential when he confronts political adversaries with petty personal insults. There is no excusing those departures from common decency. Trump also has a well-practiced art of exaggeration, exemplified in such claims as, “[t]he economy is the ‘greatest’ ‘in the history of our Country,’ the military is the ‘most powerful’ it has ever been, [and] regulations have been cut ‘at record rates’ . . . .”
At the same time, both the media and Trump’s many opponents often misdescribe what he actually says. Among the most notorious of those false descriptions was the commentary on Trump’s statements about the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This story merits close consideration, because it exemplifies how Trump’s opponents turn his innocuous statements into false but widely believed accounts of deep wrongs like racism, fascism, and the like.
The Charlottesville rally pitted a torch-bearing crowd protesting the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue against a smaller crowd of counter-protestors; it ended in a brawl. The next day a larger crowd of white supremacists and neo-Nazis squared off against masked Antifa members and other counter-protestors, during which a white supremacist rammed his car into the crowd, murdering a young woman and wounding several more. Two hours after the fatal attack, Trump stated, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” adding that “[a]bove all else, we must remember this truth, no matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all Americans first.” The next day, after criticism of Trump’s reference to “violence on many sides,” Trump issued a further statement that cited the deadly car attack, pledged that “Justice would be delivered,” and added this declaration:
Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans. We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.
Then the next day, Trump held a press conference at which he was repeatedly asked questions like, “are you putting what you’re calling the alt-left and white supremacists on the same moral plane?” and “You said there was hatred, there was violence on both sides.” With each answer, Trump attempted to distinguish between non-violent and violent protestors, noting that the original protest concerned the removal of a civil war statue, and emphasizing his view that there were both violent and non-violent protesters on both sides. The statement that was later relied on to denounce Trump was this:
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists – because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people. But you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets, and with the baseball bats. You had a lot of bad people in the other group.
Toward the end of the conference Trump again condemned “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists . . . [and] white nationalists.”
Ever since, Democratic leaders and major media outlets have shamelessly inverted Trump’s words, falsely suggesting that he praised racists and equated non-violent civil rights protestors with violent white supremacists – neither of which Trump did. A few examples:
- Joe Biden: Trump’s words “shocked the conscience of our nation. He said there were some ‘very fine people on both sides’ . . . assigning a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.”
- Kamala Harris (on X): Trump “called neo-Nazis ‘fine people.’”
- Elizabeth Warren: Trump “has given aid and comfort to white supremacists. He’s done the wink and a nod. He has talked about white supremacists as fine people.”
- Corey Booker: “He is . . . sowing these kinds of divisions to hate-mongers, in fact failing to even condemn them . . . .”
Major media outlets joined the pile-on, such as:
- The Atlantic Monthly: “Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides’”
- New York Daily News: “President Trump calls white supremacists ‘very fine people,’ blames Charlottesville on ‘both sides’ in bizarre Trump Tower tirade”
- Media Matters: “Laura Ingraham claims Trump ‘did not stand up for Nazis’ when he called the Charlottesville Nazis ‘very fine people’”
Accordingly, and like so much of the public discourse about Trump, the reactions to his post-Charlottesville comments reflect a willful inversion of reality.
Taken together, the cumulative list of Trump’s purported liabilities – his policy agenda, the election fraud claims, the January 6 protest, his post-Charlottesville remarks, and his sometimes harsh rhetoric – all that falls well short of the highly curated narrative of an American Hitler aiming to launch a fascist coup. To be clear, this conclusion says nothing about the efficacy of Trump’s policies, the validity of his election fraud claims, the wisdom or lack thereof in urging the January 6 protest, or the quality of his rhetoric. Nor does this conclusion validate what many would consider his obviously wrong decisions, like pardoning the deeply corrupt ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich, pardoning the apparently corrupt New York Mayor Eric Adams, and pardoning the violent police assailants from the January 6 riot. Nonetheless, what the foregoing analysis does make plentifully clear is that the widespread “Trump-Is-Hitler” meme constitutes an unequivocal detachment from reality. And hence equally detached from reality are the several phenomena driven by that false meme, namely, the widespread wolf-crying about imminent fascism, the mass de-friending of Trump voters, and the breaking of prosecutorial norms in an effort to send Trump off to prison.
All this leaves an especially conspicuous question on the table, namely, why? What causes this exceptional negation of reality with respect to Trump? That is, what actually drives Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Henry Kopel is a former U.S. federal prosecutor and the author of the book War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom. Kopel is an honors graduate of Brandeis University, Oxford University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and is an annual guest lecturer on prosecuting hate crimes at the University of Connecticut Law School. He serves on the global advisory board for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.