Politically speaking, you know you’ve arrived when they name a psychiatric condition to describe the behavior of your opponents.

Why? Because such a condition will cause them to do stupid things. Idiotic things. Like reflexively taking utterly untenable political positions purely because they’re the opposite of the one you yourself hold — positions, for example, in favor of open borders, and defunding the police, and wokeism in the military, and men competing against women in sports, and taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for imprisoned illegal aliens, and appallingly wasteful Big Government inefficiency.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is a weapons-grade version of an affliction that psychiatrist-turned-columnist Charles Krauthammer first described back in 2003: “It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ‘Secondary Mania,’ Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven’t been looking for new ones. But it’s time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land. Bush Derangement Syndrome: The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.”

Here again, otherwise normal folks get spitting mad with the mere mention of Le Bête Orange. Trump Derangement Syndrome is as real as the hair on Donald Trump’s head, and it’s causing the self-destruction of the Democrats as a political party.

What Trump has done is to perfect what amounts to a two-step process: First, get your political enemies to hate your guts; second, seek out and embrace a series of issues that are wildly popular with the American people — the 60-40 and 70-30 issues — and thereby force your opponents to paint themselves into an emotively unhinged electoral corner.

Columnist David Marcus calls this “incendiary common sense,” and he uses the case of Springfield, Ohio, which had been inundated with Haitian migrants under Joe Biden’s ruinous immigration policies, to make his point. Recall that Trump had caused a furor when he took an unverified news story — that some segment of the immigrant population had taken to eating the residents’ cats and dogs — and used it to call attention to a commonsensical political point: Why on earth did Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats think it was a good idea to drop 20,000 Haitians into a largely blue-collar Midwestern town of 50,000? Marcus then cites a more recent example — the roiling of the political landscape by a newly created Department of Government Efficiency:

We see something similar unfolding now with DOGE. At first, the Trump White House leaned into the idea that Elon Musk and his merry band of boy genius coders would run roughshod over government spending. This led directly to screeching and howling about how Musk is an unelected autocrat, or the real president.

But once again, by the time the screaming fades, Americans are left asking why they are funding trans theater companies in Ireland or organizations that actively censor American citizens through agencies like USAID.

Even The New York Times has been forced to concede Trump’s capture of this rhetorical high ground: “The flood of ‘common sense’ comments on Fox News echoes the language Mr. Trump and his new administration have used to justify his policies — many of which have deeply divided the country, polls have shown. The administration has deployed the slogan to support a range of actions, from banning paper straws to reversing efforts to stem climate change, and has described his first weeks as a ‘revolution in common sense.’”

Here, we’d only take issue with the Times’s characterization of a “deeply divided” country. The 2024 election was the least racially divisive one in half a century, and Donald Trump’s polling numbers have never been better. Perhaps even more important, the American people finally feel like the country is headed in the right direction, having recently snapped a 20-year losing streak of “wrong-track” pessimism.

As for the Democrats, their position for the next four years seems precarious. They’re leaderless, rudderless, and utterly out of political power. In addition, they’ve come to be seen as an out-of-touch bunch of sourpuss elitists — and, yes, a political party that lacks common sense. Indeed, they’ve fallen into the Trump-set trap of defending foreign aid, the Beltway bureaucracy, and the infuriating notion that a government job is essentially a lifetime no-cut contract.

“I believe the canary in the coal mine for what happened on November 5 was the recent showing that, for the first time in modern history, Americans now see the Republicans as the party of the working class and Democrats as the party of the elites.” So says newly elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, who adds, “It’s time to remind working Americans — and also show them every day — that the Democratic Party always has been and always will be the party of the worker.”

To Martin we say: Good luck with that.