In a nutshell

In a recent essay for Verfassungsblog, legal scholar Aoife O’Donoghue examines how the label “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) has migrated from political insult to something more consequential: a rhetorical device that pathologises criticism of executive power. Drawing a line from Hobbes’s seventeenth-century coinage of tyrannophobia, the supposedly “foolish fear” of strong government, to today’s American political vocabulary, O’Donoghue argues that ridicule of those who warn about authoritarian drift is itself a tool for normalising it.

She notes legislative attempts in Minnesota, Arizona, and at the federal level to formally classify TDS as a mental health condition; none have succeeded, but the very fact that such proposals were introduced, she contends, signals a troubling shift.

Her core thesis is that naming tyranny is one of the constitutional preconditions for resisting it. When the act of naming is made to seem ridiculous, the bulwarks of liberal constitutionalism (checks and balances, separation of powers, impeachment) are weakened before they are ever invoked.

Our take

O’Donoghue’s framing leans on a Hobbesian binary: strong government or chaos. We find it too constraining. A more useful lens, and one closer to our own institutional DNA, comes from Pascal: “la tyrannie est le désir de domination universelle et hors de son ordre.”

Tyranny is not defined by the intensity of power but by power exercised outside its proper sphere. That distinction matters here. The TDS taunt works precisely because it forces critics into Hobbes’s binary: either you accept robust executive action or you are hysterical. The Pascalian reframe dissolves the trap.

The question is not whether power is strong, but whether it stays within its order: whether universities remain places of education and research, courts remain adjudicative rather than political, and regulators remain technical rather than ideological.

Concerns about democratic erosion become, on this view, not symptoms of paranoia but ordinary boundary-policing between spheres of legitimate authority. This is precisely the terrain of our work on attack surface reduction and disruption of core mission: identifying when an institution is being pulled out of its order for partisan ends, regardless of which side is doing the pulling. Naming a boundary violation is not derangement, but simply governance.