How to keep your Trump Anxiety Disorder from becoming Trump Derangement Syndrome

Not only is Trump Anxiety Disorder (TAD) an actual diagnosis from actual therapists, but it's hard to trust anyone who isn't suffering from it; if you don't have at least a touch of TAD, you're not paying attention. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) may be more of a pejorative diagnosis from Donald Trump's supporters at Fox News and Donald Trump himself, but it's also a real danger. While recognizing the real danger of Trump and Trumpism to the nation and the world, we shouldn't let it dominate our lives. A serious case of TDS would make it hard to appreciate all the non-Trump areas of our world; I can imagine a TDS sufferer getting so bad that doctors would prescribe a radical treatment of pulling all the electronic links and asking him or her to take a retreat to a world of nature hikes and vinyl records and books that were printed before 2016. During Vietnam and Watergate, I was very politically active, going to marches and writing letters to the editor -- maybe a little obsessed at times -- but there was no 24-hour news on television (there was no 24-hour television, period), so I got a natural break from Nixon to read books or listen to records or play guitar. There was literally no news available between the time the TV networks played the national anthem and signed off at midnight until the local newspaper arrived on your doorstep the next morning.

I was recently laid off. For the first time in forty years, I don't have a workplace to go to every day. I was worried about the temptation of daytime cable news and its ability to turn my TAD into a case of incurable TDS (I've seen those people on Twitter who tweet fanatically about every "Morning Joe" guest), so I've taken a few steps. I've lived completely without television for years before, but I didn't take that drastic step this time. I was able (after too much time on the phone with Time Warner Spectrum) to reduce the number of available channels to the lowest number, basically the New York over-the-air channels (if I lived in a place where I could get TV over the air) and C-Span and some shopping channels. No Netflix. No Amazon. No Hulu. No HBO. No ESPN(s). No Fox News (not that I watched anyway). No MSNBC (sorry, Rachel). No CNN. No panels of  "experts" trying to attract eyeballs 24/7/365 with manufactured political conflict. No Corey Lewandowski or Alan Dershowitz or Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway popping up unexpectedly on my television to cause an outbreak of TDS inflammation. It's not as good as the days when there were only three stations, but I have it close to the point where there's never anything on worth watching. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I want to get to the point where I'm only tempted to watch PBS NewsHour and nothing else.

In addition to the steps I've taken with my TV, I'm also trying to cut down my time on Twitter, where  reactions to insane @realDonaldTrump tweets seem to hijack all conversations. I don't follow his account, but somehow I never miss a tweet of his as everyone on the left spreads his words. If you are following him on any social media platform, please stop; he assumes all followers (even the obviously fake accounts from Saint Petersburg troll farms) are supporters. You'll hear what he has to say anyway; you can't avoid it.

All that being said about steps to avoid TDS, let's not forget who made up the term. In an article in Salon by Chauncey DeVega two weeks before the inauguration, "You have been warned: 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' will be a cudgel used to silence his critics," the danger was explained succinctly:

The right-wing propagandists who will deploy "Trump Derangement Syndrome" against their enemies have one ultimate goal: to normalize the danger to American democracy represented by Trump and his supporters.

But still, I worry:

Is it an early warning sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome if you see the hashtag "#PumpkinSpice" trending and immediately get an image of the pumpkin-headed @realDonaldTrump as the sixth Spice Girl?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) August 28, 2018

Restoring Lustre to “Liberal”

I found "The Resurrection of the “Liberal”: How the Right Tried to Destroy American Liberalism — and How It Came Back from the Dead" by Heather Digby Parton in Salon fascinating, but that may only be because this blog was started in 2004 in disgust at the way Kerry and Clintons and other Democrats were all running away from a proud label that they were letting conservative Republicans define.

Even if restoring lustre to "Liberal" is not your raison d'être, it's worth reading.

R.I.P. Lauren Bacall 1924-2014, True Blue Liberal

Lauren Bacall passed away at the age of 89 in her apartment at the Dakota on August 12. This quote comes from the end of an article by Clancy Sigal I read on Salon this morning:

"All her life Lauren Bacall stayed a true-blue, New York, left-of-center, liberal Democrat lobbying for Adlai Stevenson and Bobby Kennedy. Or as she proudly boasted in a late interview, 'I’m anti-Republican. A liberal. The L-word!' "

I knew there was a reason other than her looks and "The Look" that I loved her in To Have and Have Not, Key Largo, Slick Hare, and The Big Sleep (and anything else she appeared in). I didn't have to dig too much deeper to find the transcript from "the L-word" interview with Larry King on CNN from May 6, 2005, when many liberals were renouncing that label.

KING: Have you always been politically motivated? 
BACALL: I have. I have. I come from a...
KING: You go back -- In fact, I saw you.
BACALL: I saw you? 
KING: I saw you speak for Adlai Stevenson. 
BACALL: You did? 
KING: In New York. I believe Bogey was with you. 
BACALL: Yes. 
KING: In '52. 
BACALL: '52. That's when my -- two of my greatest friendships began with Arthur Schlesinger and Alistair Cooke, 1952. 
KING: And what a man Stevenson was. 
BACALL: Oh, what a great man. (INAUDIBLE) you see this country. Please. Don't get me started, as they say. 
KING: So we missed a good opportunity. I think, even his critic was say that Adlai Stevenson was a great...
BACALL: He was a brilliant, brilliant man. But no one had heard anyone except Roosevelt speak with wit. You know, they couldn't figure out what that was all about. Couldn't be serious. 
KING: He had a great wit. 
BACALL: He was brilliant. 
KING: Are you big a "D" Democrat? Do you...
BACALL: I'm a total Democrat. I'm anti-Republican. And it's only fair that you know it. Even though...
KING: Wait a minute. Are you a liberal? 
BACALL: I'm a liberal. The L word! 
KING: Egads! 
BACALL: I love it. Being a liberal is the best thing on earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you're a liberal. You do not have a small mind. Little picayune things. You want to welcome everyone. Liberal, little picayune thing. 
KING: You're open to...
BACALL: You want to welcome everyone. Liberal, I'm a Roosevelt. I'm a -- and I hear anyone say anything about FDR... 
KING: You're a new dealer, fair dealer. 
BACALL: I'm a total -- and I was a kid and I'm total, total, total liberal and proud of it. And I think it's outrageous to say "the L word". I mean, excuse me. They should be damn lucky that they were liberals here. Liberals gave more to the population of the United States than any other group. 
KING: Well, Social Security. 
BACALL: Everything.

*** 

KING: Very well said. Spoken as a true liberal.    BACALL: Don't knock the liberals.   KING: I'm not.    BACALL: Yes, you are. You secretly you do.   

The Quote of the Week Came from Phil Donahue

"I’d very much like you to see the behavior of the congressmen. They were summoned to the White House by WHIG, White House Iraq Group. This is a Karl Rove committee that included the advertising warriors who named our invasion “Shock and Awe,” and “Rolling Thunder,” like video games. And they gave them their talking points: “A smoking gun will become a mushroom cloud”; “The longer we wait, the more dangerous he becomes”; “Saddam has more weapons of mass destruction than Hitler ever had”; “I see Hitler in Saddam Hussein.” And they read this, they’re looking down at the piece of paper, in what was at most a shell debate, that led to the deaths of over 4,500 service people, men and women both, not to mention how many injuries, we’re not even sure, we’re not even sure how many Iraqis are dead, and the refugees are in the millions.
This is unbelievable. You’ve got to see this debate. It’s truly a very instructive piece on what you can do if you scare the people. George Bush took this nation, the mainstream media included, and led it right into this war. It was an amazingly executed, brilliantly executed, plan. The politics of fear. ..."
--Phil Donahue

This is from an interview with Elias Isquith in Salon that was published on July 10 with the title, "Phil Donahue’s vindication: Media icon unloads on Fox, Cheney and what happened at MSNBC; Legendary TV host was fired for opposing Iraq war. Here's how he feels seeing the return of those who got it wrong." I couldn't resist repeating this particular part of the interview because he again speaks about the pivotal role of the public relations team, the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, that lied us into the war, and which I tried to beat the drum about on both trueblueliberal.org and whiggate.blogspot.com since 2005. Every time WHIG comes up in the news again, I make sure I check one thing; I search The New York Times to see if they have yet mentioned the White House Iraq Group in their news pages.  I may be missing something, but I still cannot find it mentioned outside the comments sections and opinion pages. If America's Paper Of Record (which gladly printed WHIG's aluminum-tube lies under Judith Miller's byline) doesn't recognize the existence of the WHIG, did it exist?

(This is being cross-posted on both the TrueBlueLiberal and Whiggate Update blogs)