Going Quackers: Trump Derangement Syndrome—The Sequel

How do you feel about the bigly impressive election victory of Donald Trump over in the USA on November 5? Personally, I was delighted, but I do recognise that not everyone will share my feelings, especially not emotionally vulnerable young left-leaning Americans like those currently attending the University of Oregon, right in the heart of Harris-Walz country.

Students there were thought to be so potentially upset by the prospect of a Trump-Vance success that they were offered the services of a fully qualified medical employee named “Quacktavious the Therapy Duck” on the day of the alarmingly democratic vote itself:

If you click on the “I’m Interested” link there, by the way, it honestly takes you to the following prompt-screen:

I’m afraid I must have misplaced my own personal “Duck ID”, so could proceed no further. Nonetheless, I was still highly intrigued. Is there really any reliable clinical evidence that prolonged exposure to waterfowl can improve one’s own mental health and wellbeing?

An American Nursing PhD student, Alex Sargsyan, has recently investigated the potential ability of ducks to cure mental illness, something which has been dubbed a form of literal “Quack Therapy”. Believing in “the power of quacks to change lives”, Sargsyan noted that ducks had often been “used for amusement and entertainment”, as at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, which sensibly conducts a twice-daily duck parade, “where the ducks march through the hotel lobby”, successfully preventing suicide amongst guests. Furthermore, observed Sargsyan, ducks “are highly trainable, have calming presence, and [a] small size”, so would be much better suited to the task at hand than larger, less compliant, potential therapy-creatures like chimpanzees, blue whales, or lions.

During his studies, Sargsyan claimed to have discovered a “statistically significant decrease in anxiety levels” amongst sad people exposed to quacking. “It was as if the ducks had a magical touch,” Sargsyan said. “Their presence alone seemed to melt away the worries and burdens that weighed heavily on the participants’ minds.”

Appropriately, it appeared as if ducks could give patients a bill of clean health, and such services were soon to be needed more than ever. Sargsyan’s amazing clinical discovery was reported upon earlier this very year, just in time to help repel and repair the latest mental health epidemic currently sweeping fully one half of America and the entire Western world – that of Trump Derangement Syndrome Two: The Sequel.

School of very soft knocks

The previous epidemic of DONALD-16 came completely unexpected to most medical authorities, with Trump’s 2016 presidential victory against Hillary Clinton being written off as impossible by most dismissive psephological authorities of the day, but come the latest variant of the disease, DONALD-24, American electoral epidemiologists were more prepared.

Like so many viral plagues, DONALD-24 spreads best amongst unmasked and unvaccinated young people living and working together in constant close proximity, as at schools, colleges and universities, and it is here the main major outbreaks seem mainly today to have occurred. Not all institutions of learning are lucky enough to have a qualified mentality mallard present on-campus, of course, so alternative quack prophylactic or curative measures against DONALD-24 have had to be employed instead.

Students at Georgetown University in Washington DC were deemed especially at risk of infection: being based in the Capitol, there was a severe risk they may one day find themselves directly exposed to the presence of the Big Orange Germ himself. Doctors there provided a special “Self-Care Suite” for students to use, filled with areas devoted to such necessary self-therapeutic measures as “Tea, Cocoa and Self-Care”, “Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises”, “Milk and Cookies”, “Healthy Treats and Healthy Habits”, “Snacks and Self-Guided Meditation” and even a “Lego Station”. Attendance at the giant nursery in question costs $61,200 per annum, so for that sum parents would expect their babies to be so very well-protected from all harm.

The University of Puget Sound, meanwhile, programmed an entire week devoted to “ENGAGING IN SELF AND COMMUNITY CARE”, something so medically important it had to be declared USING CAPITAL LETTERS, which included timetabled events like these:

Obviously, gay students needed their own special bespoke prophylactic support session, DONALD-24 being far more deadly to them than HIV-AIDS could ever be: Support Space for LGBTQ+ Students, Faculty and Staff.

The University also provided helpful advice like the following, to those students who apparently did not understand what democracy was, and that, by definition, one side always had to lose, sometimes even your own: Avoid perseverating on things your can’t control

The best way to dispel post-election DONALD-24 blues, though, was simply to stand up, move around, and shake off all the viral load by dancing your disease and demons away like they did in the Middle Ages!   Several places of alleged learning simply cancelled classes altogether the day after the vote, once news of Trump’s victory had emerged, so traumatic was it for the student bodies concerned (even those who had voted for him?). As was pointed out, Jewish and Israeli students didn’t get the day off after October 7 last year. They just had to go in regardless – past all the baying student mobs wishing they had been killed and raped by Hamas too.

The suggestively named “Ethical Culture Field School” in New York (where pro- and anti-Israel students had previously fought one another over October 7 themselves, by the way) declared a day off timetable following the ballot for those who needed it, should they “feel too emotionally distressed” to hold their pens any more. Qualified psychiatrists (human, not avian) were also on stand-by to provide immediate counselling to quaking children, due to the “high-stakes and emotional time for our [school] community”.

Adult education, infantile educators

Classes were cancelled at Harvard, too … upon the insistence of DONALD-24-infected adult lecturers who were terrified of “fascism” finally coming to America every bit as much as their weeping teenage students were.

Physics Professor Jennifer E. Hoffman announced her office would be transformed from an ordinary seminar-room into “a space to process the election”. According to an email she sent out to students: “Many in our community are sleep-deprived, again grieving for glass ceilings that weren’t shattered, fearful for the future, or embarrassed to face our international colleagues. I stress-baked several pans of lemon bars to share.”

Truly clinically and politically “stressed” people don’t just “bake” their blues away, do they? Did they cook one another many lemon bars in Auschwitz, do you think? No, I think there were some rather more serious ovens for the inmates to be concerned about there, in a time and place where “fascism” was an actual real thing, not a mere hysterical label for a Scary Orange Man.

As this all suggests, DONALD-24 is also highly communicable to (supposed) adults. At Michigan State University, leading Catastrophe Studies professor Shlagha Borah announced she was cancelling her classes on November 6, in order to “grieve” the previous night’s result:

Other adults infected globally were staff at the UK’s leading left-wing newspaper The Guardian, whose November 6 front page read as follows: “American dread.”

If any of the newspaper’s staff were suffering from a bad clinical case of “American dread” themselves, the outlet’s editor, Katherine Viner, offered free psychiatric counselling services from their in-house “People team”.

You don’t have to be mad to work here … but it helps!!!

I was only joking when I said there was a new contagious mental disease out there called DONALD-24, but it appears some media-based mental health professionals actually think there might be such a condition for real. On the aptly named self.com, the one-stop shop for all your solipsistic self-absorption needs, a clinical psychologist named Adia Gooden PhD was interviewed under the headline “Your Grief Over the Election Results Is Entirely Valid”, saying that Trump Derangement Syndrome was a real thing, which could cause victims to “cycle through disbelief, frustration, numbness, and/or existential dread”, as in The Guardian’s deeply doom-laden headline.

The article’s author recommended anyone suffering this dire malady should try switching off from their wholly rational fears of civilisational apocalypse by reading a book, listening to a podcast, or watching a TV show – before, at the end, linking the site’s mainly female audience to another article on self.com they may enjoy reading, called “Just a List of the Bizarre, Gross, and Upsetting Things J.D. Vance Has Said About Women”. Wouldn’t reading that be a bit counterproductive?

Elsewhere, Forbes.com had another highly qualified head-doctor, Bruce Y. Lee (not to be confused with the kung-fu Y-less version), on-hand to offer “Ten Top Tips” for staving off actual suicide over Trump’s victory.

“Try Treating Politicians Like Babies Or Cartoon Characters – Remember the movie The Waterboy, when the coach played by Henry Winkler was afraid of the opposing coach and overcame this fear by visualizing that coach as a baby? [No.] How about doing the same with all these oh-look-how-big-my-whatever-is political characters? After all, just because someone looks all grown-up doesn’t mean they will behave that way. You can also picture them as cartoon characters such as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons or Chester Cheetah.”

Yes, that tactic sounds really grown up in and of itself, doesn’t it?

Lee concluded by offering readers the following advice: “If you are finding all this post-election stuff too much to handle, don’t be afraid to seek professional help … If you find yourself not able to function or having any thoughts of harming yourself, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline as soon as possible … No politician is worth hurting yourself over.”

Yes, cheer up, DONALD-24 sufferers. Treatments other than self-extinction are available, particularly from registered therapeutic practitioners like Quacktavious. You know, it makes sense that the best cure for Donald is a Duck.

How did you react to the election results? 

AUTHOR

Steven Tucker

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.