Five Republicans in the Minnesota Senate want to add “Trump derangement syndrome” to the state’s definition of mental illness, in a bill scheduled for introduction Monday.
The term “Trump derangement syndrome” has long been used by President Donald Trump and his supporters to hit back at his critics.
Bill SF 2589 describes the so-called syndrome as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of (Trump.)” Symptoms could be “verbal expressions of intense hostility” towards Trump or acts of aggression and violence towards his supporters and symbols.
The bill was co-authored and introduced by state Sens. Eric Lucero, Steve Drazkowski, Nathan Wesenberg, Justin D. Eichorn and Glenn H. Gruenhagen.
“I am proud to be one of the co-authors on this bill which calls attention to the oftentimes outrageous, violent and unreasonable reactions we’ve seen towards a President who loves America and wants us to be prosperous, strong, safe and great again,” Gruenhagen, said in a post on Facebook Saturday.
Trump and his administration have accused his critics of having “Trump derangement syndrome.”
In the early stages of the 2024 presidential campaign, when former President Joe Biden accused Trump of using language that echoed Nazi propaganda, Trump’s campaign called it a sign of “Trump derangement syndrome,” a term Trump also used against former Vice President Kamala Harris along the 2024 campaign trail.
“Trump derangement syndrome” iterates on an earlier version of the term coined by prominent conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer: the “Bush derangement syndrome.”
Krauthammer, before his death in 2018, wrote a column describing the evolution of the term for Trump as having “not just general hysteria about the subject, but additionally the inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences on the one hand and signs of psychic pathology on the other.”
That language is copied almost exactly in the bill’s text, which reads:
“Symptoms may include Trump-induced general hysteria, which produces an inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in (Trump’s) behavior.”
The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), the state affiliate of the Democratic Party, criticized the bill.
“This is why Minnesota Republicans have lost every statewide election in recent memory − every time they get an opportunity to try to improve Minnesotans’ lives, they instead double down on an agenda that caters to their party’s most extreme right-wing activists,” a DFL spokesperson said in a statement emailed to USA TODAY.
The bill was scheduled for a first reading with the Health and Human Services Committee Monday. DFL holds a slight majority in the Minnesota State Senate.
Contributing: David Jackson, Christal Hayes, Mary Walrath-Holdridge
Kinsey Crowley is a trending news reporter at USA TODAY. Reach her at kcrowley@gannett.com. Follow her on X and TikTok @kinseycrowley or Bluesky at @kinseycrowley.bsky.social.
