Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just said out loud what millions of Americans have been thinking for years.
The left-wing media is not going to like this one bit.
And RFK Jr. dropped a bombshell about a health crisis that left the fake news media shell-shocked.
Kennedy Puts TDS on the Medical Map
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. raised eyebrows last week when he told podcaster Adam Carolla that not only is Trump Derangement Syndrome a real thing, but that he has considered officially giving it an ICD — International Classification of Diseases — code.
Kennedy made clear that the remark came partly in response to a joke Carolla made about a hypothetical TDS vaccine. But Kennedy wasn’t entirely kidding. He has said plainly that the phenomenon tearing apart families and friendships across America is genuinely happening — including, he has noted, inside his own family.
And Kennedy isn’t alone in saying so. Manhattan-based psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert told Fox News Digital that TDS infects roughly 75% of his liberal patients. “This is a profound pathology, and I would even go so far to call it the defining pathology of our time,” Alpert said.
Alpert described what he sees in his practice in stark terms. “It doesn’t take long for me to pick up on this: People are obsessed with Trump. They’re fixated. They’re hyper-fixated on Trump,” he said. “And they talk about some of the features of this disorder. They can’t sleep. They feel traumatized by Mr. Trump. They feel restless.”
Wrong Diagnosis, Real Disease
Fox News columnist David Marcus, author of Charade: The COVID Lies That Crushed A Nation, took the argument a step further — and his angle is worth paying attention to.
Marcus agrees with Kennedy and Alpert that TDS is a genuine phenomenon. But he pushes back on the idea that it functions as a mental disorder at the individual level. What America is actually watching, he writes, is classic mass hysteria.
The distinction matters more than it might seem. You can’t treat mass hysteria with therapy or, as Carolla joked, a vaccine. The entire system feeding the social contagion has to be confronted. The problem doesn’t live inside any one person’s head. It lives in the media ecosystem that surrounds them every single day.
Marcus draws a comparison to the trans identity phenomenon — noting that in both cases, outside forces aren’t merely influencing behavior, they are relentlessly reinforcing it. The condition doesn’t primarily exist inside the individual. It exists everywhere outside the individual.
The Bogeyman Is Back
There are four recognized hallmarks of people caught up in mass hysteria, and Marcus walks through how TDS checks every box.
The media’s role in all of this is impossible to ignore. Late-night television, *The View*, and even sports broadcasts have turned Donald Trump into a figure of near-mythological menace. Marcus points out that the word “bogeyman” actually traces back to stories British parents told their children to frighten them about French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte — the original bogeyman. Centuries later, it’s not children being scared. It’s grown adults.
But it gets worse. These adults don’t just feel frightened. They feel the threat is so existential, so primal, that they cut ties with family members who support Trump. Think pieces, advice columns, and TikTok videos actively encourage people to sever relationships with their MAGA relatives. The media doesn’t just reflect the hysteria. It manufactures it, packages it, and ships it out on a daily basis.
And the left-wing media machine keeps the engine running around the clock. Every single action Trump takes gets treated as the end of democracy. Every policy disagreement becomes a five-alarm fire. After years of that, is it really any surprise that some people can’t sleep?
This Ends When the Media Wants It To
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that Marcus puts squarely on the table: every known case of mass hysteria in recorded history eventually ran its course and ended.
TDS will end too. The question is how long the media and the Democrat Party want to keep it going, because they are the ones with the power to stop it.
So long as every Trump action gets framed as an apocalyptic threat, the hysteria keeps feeding itself. Families stay broken. Friends stop talking. People lose sleep over a man they’ve never met and never will meet. The media profits from the outrage. Democrat fundraising depends on it. There’s a reason they won’t let it go.
Marcus doesn’t pretend the cure is simple. Mass hysteria doesn’t dissolve the moment someone points it out. But naming it accurately — as a social contagion driven from outside, not a mental illness bubbling up from within — is at least a start.
Kennedy and Alpert deserve credit for taking TDS seriously when most of the establishment laughed the idea off. But the real diagnosis goes deeper than any one patient on any one therapist’s couch. The media built this. And until somebody holds them accountable for it, they’ll keep right on building.
Sources: Fox News Opinion, David Marcus, “Trump Derangement Syndrome is real mass hysteria, not a mental disorder,” May 2026; Fox News Digital, “Psychotherapist says Trump Derangement Syndrome is real mental issue,” November 2025.