On Friday, as I am wont to do, I tweeted something silly. News had just broken about Elon Musk trying to break off his agreement to buy Twitter1, and I was having a little laugh about it. As I wrapped up my work for the week, I input a handful of prompts into the Midjourney artificial intelligence art tool. With Musk on the mind (there has to be a less gross way of wording that, but, uh, onward), I typed in the words, “Elon Musk as” — and tried to think of something amusing — “a Minion.” The results gave me a little bit of a chuckle, so I tweeted out some of the images.

Parker Molloy @ParkerMolloy

#MidjourneyAI prompt: Elon Musk as a Minion

1:28 AM ∙ Jul 9, 2022

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154Likes21Retweets

“Is MDS the new TDS?” read one of the responses.

“MDS?” What was “MDS?” And “TDS?” Oh. I realized he was referring to “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a favorite insult of the right for the past several years. If you’re unfamiliar with it, basically, if you say something negative about Donald Trump, his supporters will pop into your Twitter mentions to smugly proclaim that you have “TDS.” So “MDS” must be “Musk Derangement Syndrome,” I realized.

Anyway, this annoying-if-inconsequential response got me thinking a bit about the origin of “TDS,” which predates Trump’s presidency by 14 years.

In 1978, psychiatrists Charles Krauthammer and Gerald Klerman published a piece in the medical journal Archives of General Psychiatry to share their research on a new condition known as secondary mania. Fast-forward 25 years, and Krauthammer, no longer working in medicine, “discovered” another new condition: Bush Derangement Syndrome.

It was December 2003, and Krauthammer wrote that it was “time to don the white coat again,” as “a plague is abroad in the land.” Citing his medical bonafides, Krauthammer flippantly “diagnosed” his political rivals2 with this new condition, which he described as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.”