Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Chronic Trump Stress Disorder

We live in a world where soldiers can come home from war carrying something called PTSD—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We understand the concept. You experience something terrifying, your brain files it under HOLY FUCKING SHIT, and then, long after the danger has supposedly passed, your nervous system keeps acting like somebody is still shooting at you.

But I think we may need to expand the diagnostic manual.

Because millions of us have developed something I will unofficially call CTSD: Chronic Trump Stress Disorder.

And before anyone reaches for their medical degree, no, I am not suggesting this is an actual psychiatric diagnosis. I am suggesting that if you have spent the better part of the last decade watching Donald Trump occupy the political landscape, your nervous system deserves hazard pay.

The first Trump presidency, from 2017 to 2021, was basically four years of waking up every morning and wondering:

What the hell happened while I was asleep?

Who did he insult?

Who did he fire?

What institution did he attack?

What treaty did he threaten?

What country did he piss off?

And, because apparently this was a perfectly reasonable thing for Americans to contemplate before breakfast:

Who is he going to bomb next?

There was a strange rhythm to it. You’d wake up, make coffee, check the news, and discover that the President of the United States had apparently spent the previous evening playing geopolitical Jenga.

And somehow, looking back, that version of Trump now seems almost quaint.

Quaint.

That is an absolutely fucking terrifying word to use when describing the first Trump presidency.

Because the current iteration doesn’t feel like a rerun.

It feels like someone took the original series, removed the brakes, threw the instruction manual into a fireplace, and decided the writers’ room should consist entirely of people yelling “What if we made it worse?”

The exhausting part isn’t simply disagreeing with Donald Trump. Political disagreement is normal. Democrats and Republicans have hated each other’s policies since before cable news discovered there was money to be made keeping everybody permanently furious.

This is different.

The stress comes from the unpredictability.

You don’t know what tomorrow’s headline is going to be.

You don’t know whether the next morning will bring a policy announcement, a constitutional crisis, an international confrontation, another bizarre executive action, another attack on an institution, another political vendetta, or something so completely fucking surreal that you briefly wonder whether The Onion has somehow taken over CNN.

And eventually, your brain starts adapting.

You stop being surprised.

That’s probably the most disturbing part.

The bar for “this is completely insane” keeps moving.

Something happens and you think, Well, that’s certainly disturbing.

Then something else happens and you think, Okay, that’s worse.

Then something happens after that and your brain simply shrugs and says:

Of course.

That’s CTSD.

It’s not necessarily panic anymore.

It’s anticipatory exhaustion.

It’s waking up already wondering what you’re going to have to process today.

It’s opening your phone with the emotional equivalent of putting on body armor.

It’s seeing a notification about the President and thinking, Oh Jesus, what now?

And the rest of the world gets dragged into it because American politics doesn’t exist inside America’s borders anymore. When the United States sneezes, the global economy reaches for a tissue. When the American president starts threatening allies, enemies, treaties, institutions or entire geopolitical arrangements, people everywhere start paying attention.

Which means CTSD may not even be exclusively American.

We may have accidentally exported it.

There is something uniquely exhausting about living through a political era in which normal has become the thing you have to explain.

You find yourself telling someone, “No, seriously, this actually happened.”

And they say, “You’re kidding.”

And you say, “I wish I were.”

That’s the psychological toll.

Not necessarily one gigantic traumatic event, but the cumulative effect of thousands of smaller shocks. The constant drip-drip-drip of outrage, uncertainty, anger, fear and disbelief.

Eventually, you become emotionally conditioned to expect the next shoe to drop.

And that’s where my completely unofficial medical diagnosis comes in:

Chronic Trump Stress Disorder.

Symptoms may include:

Checking the news before you’ve even finished your coffee.

Saying “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” several times a week.

Developing a reflexive distrust of the phrase breaking news.

Experiencing a brief moment of genuine peace when nothing political has happened for six consecutive hours.

And perhaps the most serious symptom of all:

Remembering the first Trump presidency and thinking, “Honestly, those were simpler times.”

Because that’s when you know we’ve gone completely off the rails.

When the period you once considered an unprecedented political nightmare starts looking like the calm before the storm, you’ve officially entered CTSD territory.

And maybe the real problem isn’t that we’re all becoming overly sensitive.

Maybe we’re becoming accustomed to the abnormal.

That’s what should scare us.

Because a democracy shouldn’t require its citizens to develop psychological coping mechanisms just to make it through the news cycle.

We shouldn’t have to wake up every morning wondering what our government did while we were sleeping.

We shouldn’t have to normalize instability.

We shouldn’t have to become experts in constitutional crises, executive power, geopolitical brinkmanship and political retaliation just to understand what the fuck is happening in our own country.

But here we are.

So if you find yourself staring blankly at the television while another completely unprecedented event unfolds and thinking, Well, that’s Tuesday, congratulations.

You may have CTSD.

There is currently no known vaccine.

The recommended treatment is apparently another election.

And judging by the way things are going, I’m not entirely convinced that’s going to lower anybody’s blood pressure.