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“Trump Derangement Syndrome”

The true meaning of the expression

Barry Lyons
4 min readMar 16, 2025
Credit: Nick Anderson, Counterpoint

In today’s New York Times you will find a long piece by Maureen Dowd on Graydon Carter, who is widely known in the magazine business as the co-founder of Spy, a satirical monthly (now defunct), and who had a 25-year stint as editor of Vanity Fair.

At Spy Donald Trump was regarded as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” and in the Times piece there is this from Ms. Dowd about Carter’s time at Vanity Fair: “His job helming Vanity Fair entailed meeting a lot of narcissists, but he calls Mr. Trump ‘a narcissist in a class of his own’.” When Dowd reached out to Stephen Cheung, the White House communications director, for comment Cheung responded with this: “President Trump is beloved by America and sits in the Oval Office every single day making the country better, while Graydon Carter is a washed-up has-been who can barely put a coherent thought together because he suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his tiny brain.”

There are two obvious lies in that statement. For those who are currently seeing their retirement accounts go into a recession-flirting decline, Trump is not “making the country better,” and as for being “beloved by America,” try telling that to a) the 74,999,166 people who didn’t vote him in the 2024 election and b) to the many people who…

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Barry Lyons
Barry Lyons

Written by Barry Lyons

Lives in New York City, owns too many books and CDs. But then again, there's no such thing as "too many" books and CDs.

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