This story is a collaboration between Cripple Media and Trend Friends.

This just in: Minnesota Legislators are seeking to revise state law to include “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—dubbed TDS by President Trump and his fans—as a form of mental illness, according to The Hill. Introduced by five Republican state senators, including Justin Eichorn who was just arrested for soliciting a minor, the publication reports that the bill would add TDS to the state’s definition of mental illnesses.

The bill defines TDS as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump” with symptoms that may include “Trump-induced hysteria” that is said to distinguish between “legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology in President Donald J. Trump’s behavior.” TDS, as stated in the bill, can be expressed by “verbal expressions of intense hostility” toward Trump and by “overt acts of aggression and violence” against Trump supporters or against “anything that symbolizes President Donald J. Trump.”

According to The Hill, “Trump has long invoked the fabricated diagnosis as a way to label his political opponents as mentally ill when they criticize him or express outrage in response to actions he has taken.” In fact, Trump has said that some of his biggest critics suffer from TDS including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who called the president a fascist, and former Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who investigated Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Meanwhile, many of his Democratic opponents have also been labeled as having a case of TDS.

In layman’s terms, TDS, according to @therapyjeff, is being used to mock people who have strong emotional reactions to Trump and these people are being labeled as totally irrational. Essentially they’re trying to pathologize and silence people who oppose or criticize Trump by labeling their dissent as mental illness while framing it as a legitimate “concern” for public health. “It is total fucking nonsense dressed up in clinical language,” Jeff Guenther, LPC, stated in his latest video. “Diagnosis must be based on rigorous research, clinical evidence, and peer reviewed validation, not political agendas.”

According to Guenther, there’s a long history of mental illness being misused politically—for example, there was drapetomania, a diagnosis given to enslaved people who desired freedom plus homosexuality was once pathologized in earlier editions of the DSM.

The bill, the therapist says, looks like an attempt to legally punish or institutionalize those with dissenting opinions—he says it’s dangerous political theater but the DSM has a long and meticulous vetting process and he thinks there’s no chance TDS would ever qualify as a legitimate diagnosis.

Another example of mental illness being appropriated to deny marginalized groups rights and freedoms is how in the 19th century women were routinely diagnosed as “hysteric” for being outspoken, complaining, showing emotion, and being gaslit over health concerns which is today known as medical sexism. Similarly, children were once seen as incapable of experiencing pain,  either medical and or mental illnesses because they were children and not adults.

The rise of TDS is happening amidst a slew of other ableist measures: Trump recently withdrew the US from the World Health Organization and slashed funding for mental health research, all of which will disproportionately impact the disabled community. This is despite the fact that 70 million Americans have reported being disabled. Meanwhile, this is also happening amidst UK leaders unveiling plans to slash disability welfare spending for the 16 million disabled people living there. Ableism (and fascism) is clearly spreading globally—though disability advocates assert that most people will become disabled to some degree at some point in their lives—it can happen at any time, really to anyone.

On top of this, we’ve also seen the return of the “R” word thanks to “anti-woke crusaders” while Trump’s health secretary Robert F. Kennedy wants to ban SSRI’s, which help more than 1 in 10 people in the US. “I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off SSRIs than people have getting off heroin,” he famously said during his Senate confirmation hearings. As someone who has come off multiple SSRIs, the experience isn’t bad as long as you taper off them according to your doctor’s guidance.

RFK Jr., who has become a leader of MAHA—i.e. Make America Healthy Again, a movement peddling unfounded wellness claims, supplements, and raw milk—is on a wellness trip from hell, even going on the record and confessing that he dumped a dead bear in Central Park. Since nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in November, Trump said he’d let the anti-vax politician “go wild on health.”

It’s the secretary’s lack of scientific or medical background that is truly wild—in fact, he wants to send mentally ill and addicted people to “wellness” camps or farms. “We’re going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America’s soil,” he said during a film released by his presidential campaign. See you there guys!

According to NPR, RFK Jr.’s plans do not appear to include facilities that offer proper medical treatments for seriously ill people facing severe addiction or other mental health issues. Additionally, it is being reported that people could be pressured or coerced into accepting care, with a threat of incarceration for those who refuse it.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr. has also been a major proponent of the anti-vax crusade that falsely claims vaccines cause autism. Autism, along with therapy speak, has become weaponized. When Elon Musk did the Nazi salute in January at a Trump rally, some claimed it was not in fact a Nazi salute—they argued it was merely excitement due to his “autism.” Excusing Musk’s nazism as merely a symptom of his autism, is indeed ableist rhetoric and ableism and nazism are in fact intertwined—in fact, disabled people were the first to be sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust. It is also interesting that for the public, autism is framed as a negative while Musk himself is an immigrant on the spectrum. In America, it’s only okay to be an autistic “alien” when you are a billionaire trying to go to Mars.

According to Lit Hub, disability studies scholars have examined in depth the origins of constructions of disability in Nazi-era rhetoric and practices. “German families were forced to produce family trees proving that they contained not only no Jewish ancestors but also no disabled ones.” Lit Hub reports that historians David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder uncovered how the Nazis developed both the notion of the concentration camp and the mechanics of it in killing centers at hospitals for disabled people.

“Disabled people were first separated from the general hospital population and then, in the T4 program, exterminated in gas chambers,” the publication states. ”The Nazis worked out both their ideology and their methods, later scaled up in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, on disabled people.” It’s therefore unsurprising that the disabled community is the first target of an administration that’s borrowing ideas from Nazism and pushing a fascist agenda and regime.

All things considered, TDS is just another fascist strategy of separating the liberal “radicals” from those who are deemed “normal”—it is another form of separation and cultural entrapment through legislation that “others” anyone critical of America and the current administration. In this way, anyone who is “diagnosed” with TDS is seen as unamerican and unpatriotic for criticizing Trump and having valid concerns over the state of the country. Clearly I don’t have to tell you how dangerous this is.

With Republicans “flooding the zone” by inundating the general public with a slew of harmful bills, like TDS, Americans are already overwhelmed by the rising unemployment rates, chronic climate disasters (i.e. LA fires or North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene, etc.), the spread of COVID, bird flu, measles, and a tanking economy.Americans are too busy simply surviving to track and fight every bill and measure being implemented by the edgelord conservatives. It is  frightening to consider what bills could pass that would continue suppressing free speech, which is already a growing issue—right now we’re seeing Palestinian Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khali, a lawful permanent US resident, fight deportation for protesting Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza, which is more proof that the fascist agenda is unfolding on American soil.

If anything, TDS and the rise of legislation weaponizing mental illness while the current administration verbally mocks the disabled and mentally ill is just a clinical-sounding muzzle that is threatening everyday Americans from their right to speak.