Because the U.S. media leans overwhelmingly left, Republican presidents usually have a harder time than Democratic ones. Their mistakes are more likely to be amplified, their successes are more likely to be downplayed, and the coverage they receive tends to be less favourable overall.
With Trump, however, this tendency became exaggerated out of all proportion. Many journalists became completely obsessed with the man, unable to summon any objectivity when evaluating his policies while focussing outsize criticism on his appearance and personal behaviour (‘orange man bad’, as the meme puts it.)
This is not to say Trump was necessarily a good president; just that the media’s reaction to him was far from rational. Indeed, the years 2016–2020 saw a major outbreak of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’, which the centrist commentator Fareed Zakaria defined as “hatred of President Trump so intense that it impairs people’s judgment”.
Or at least, that’s what many of us remember.
Yet good data has been lacking. Was the media really so obsessed with Trump? Or were they just as obsessed with his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush – a man whose command of the English language was also questionable.
Thanks to the expert data-scraper David Rozado, we now have the relevant data. And it suggests that Trump Derangement Syndrome is real.

Rozado tracked mentions of the past nine U.S. presidents in the country’s four main broadsheets: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times. He found that in all four cases, Trump was mentioned far more often when he was in office than the other eight presidents when they were in office.
In fact, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal (a right-leaning paper), Trump has been mentioned more often than Biden over the last two years, even though Biden is the one in the White House.
Rozado then checked whether the media’s fixation with Trump also extends to the U.K., and he found that it does. The BBC, the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian all mentioned Trump far more often than previous presidents. It’s plausible, then, that ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ afflicts the entire Anglosphere.
What does pattern above have in common with the famous woke hockey stick? If I may speculate, both show that media coverage today is disproportionately driven by what goes viral on social media, and hence by the hangups and preoccupations of a relatively small but influential journalist-activist class.
We’ve more sources of information than ever, but a lot of them are saying the same things…
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Can’t stand Trump, can’t stand Biden. RFK Jr for the win! But let’s be honest, nobody would be able to tell if Biden has been vax injured by his beloved clot shots or not would they?
”As Matt Margolis pointed out Saturday, Old Joe Biden signed off his ramblings at the National Safer Communities Summit at the University of Hartford by saying, “God save the queen, man.” It was just the latest in a lengthy string of bizarre and often incomprehensible things the putative leader of the free world has said, going back to Corn Pop and Lying, Dog-Faced Pony Soldier, and exhausted Biden regime aides are now throwing in the towel. After two and a half years of doing everything they could to make the figurehead appear coherent, they’re admitting that, just like the rest of us, they don’t have any idea what he’s talking about.
Yeah, he’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense, the voice of a new age, the perfect politician for our Age of Absurdity. Now that men can become women and you’re a genocidal bigot unless you believe that children should be allowed to decide to condemn themselves to mutilation, psychological dislocation and a lifetime of dependence on pharmaceuticals, nonsensical Old Joe is the Shakespeare of our times. Nothing makes sense any more, 2+2 no longer equals four, and we can’t trust the basic evidence of our senses, so a rambling old corruptocrat who doesn’t make any sense at all half of the time and lies the other half ought to be carved onto Mount Rushmore. It would be the quintessential Participation Trophy for an age that has cast aside all standards.”
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/06/19/even-bidens-staffers-cant-explain-the-nutty-stuff-he-says-n1704527
As thelightcavalry points out below, you don’t have to like them. It’s about outcomes. I would not invite him to dinner or want him to marry my daughters, but he was an OK prospect as President, especially compared the alternatives, and he did less damage than many others. He fluffed his lines very badly with covid because of his personality problems but, like Johnson, he was better than the opposition would have been.
And he never started a war.
Ironically as all the liberal twats I know chortled about him starting WW3. But nine of them know much about American politics or about Trump.
‘This is not to say Trump was necessarily a good president’.
Eh?! Your article demonstrates the typical lack of understanding shown by British journos of American politics.
He was (still is, actually, because of the stolen election) arguably the greatest ever POTUS.
Why?
Record employment for blacks and hispanics, economy boomed, energy exporter, energy self sufficient, secure border, peace with Russia, recognised Jerusalem as Jewish capital, recognised Golan Heights, Abraham Accords, God fearing, and that’s all I can think ofin 2 mins. All this achieved in 4 years, despite numerous personal attacks by the Deep State, 3 letter agencies and MSM.
He’s not perfect, makes poor appointments who stab him in the back and brags.
How I wish he was our PM.
Neil – you stole much of my thunder … which is to say, I agree with you.
I think Biden is a liar, corrupt and evil … as well as being senile. He also seems to be a puppet of the US deep state, which is one of the most dangerous instruments of evil in the world, IMO (the Ukraine War is an example).
Trump has many personal failings – he is narcissistic and misogynistic, amongst other things. But he is pro law and order, anti-woke, pro oil and gas, anti climate nonsense, loves America and its constitutional values and genuinely (IMO) wants to improve the lives of the American people. And, most importantly, he recognises the dangers of the deep state and may be best-placed to dismantle it (with a supportive House).
Amen. No foreign wars nor troops killed during his tenure either.
Oh, and virtually zero Palestinian terrorism. Take a look now to see how the Bidenz have stirred the hornets nest, funded Iran, opened the gates for its nuclear weapons.
As DeSantis pointed out, he had 4 years to dismantle the Deep State. He also failed to get the wall built. He could have done a lot better had he been less of a narcissist. Perhaps DeSantis might be the President that Trump could have been.
Well, the greatest president was Washington obviously. Trump and Coolidge next. Lincoln last for not averting the Civil War, tho maybe Lincoln was the finest human being.
Toby is clearly biased against Trump and it’s fun hearing Nick slap him down. The whole fallacy is based on wanting a President whom you like and admire personally whereas the only thing that matters is outcomes. Washington cemented the outcome of a constitutional republic by turning down a third term. Lincoln engaged in an horrific civil war (which was equally provoked by the South) over a highly dubious principle – the non-right of states to secede from the Union. Coolidge was a model of modesty and citizenship. Trump achieved phenomenal outcomes against phenomenal odds. I imagine Toby doesn’t get that because he did PPE at an Oxford madrassa.
Lincoln was a Republican, wasn’t he?
Appointed Supreme Court justices with a respect for the meaning of the constitution at the time it was ratified by the people, which was the orthodox approach until liberal justices started legislating from the bench I think from 50s/60s onwards.
He was poor on covid.
Agreed, but he was misled by Fauci.
Knowing who to trust, detecting when “experts” are bullshtting you, is a key aspect of leadership. Rand Paul doesn’t seem to have trouble being misled by Fauci.
Well, it might be social media’s fault, but the Twitter files have been showing that social media has, for a good while, been seen as a useful propaganda tool by those *in* power and aiming to *stay* in power.
The hatred of Trump was orchestrated, as R.F.K. Jnr has astutely pointed out, from the time in 2016 when Trump spoke against the actions of the US war machine. From that point (like R.F.K.’s assassinated father and uncle) he had to go, and every organ of government from law-enforcement to MSM were (and still are) mobilised to that end. The press coverage is therefore a deliberate effect, not a cause.
Russiagate and so on weren’t invented by social media or by the press, but it proved easy to persuade the gullible through social media, and a captive press, what an immoral Russian spy he was, so that even early on in the UK they were able to muster anti-Trump demonstrations.
Speaking of Trump and Biden ( and Elon ) this 2min thing is funny as anything! LOL Well in my opinion anyway..
https://twitter.com/CartlandDavid/status/1671456481667870720?cxt=HHwWgMCz9Y60mrIuAAAA
Absolutely brilliant…
I meet people with Trump derrangement syndrome all the time.
They are often reasonable people who at the mention of Trump their faces go all funny and they lose all sense of proportion and objectivity.
I don’t need data to tell me its real. I encounter it literally all the time.
Trump is attacking the establishment head on, so the establishment and its support base, the self important over educated classes, logically find him very threatening.
Me too. Because I’m a middle class (now ex) Londoner friends, colleagues and acquaintances just assume I find Trump abhorrent and freely quote him as an example, e.g. do you know so-and-so, he’s a TRUMP SUPPORTER! They splutter when I tell them I would have voted for him. Few of these people know much about his policies and what he actually did.
And there is a school of thought, to which I subscribe, that the Covid “pandemic” was engineered to facilitate the postal voting and subsequent election tampering which stole the election. His opposition was Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden, is anyone really surprised that the USA is circling the drain, and when it goes it will probably take the UK down with it. I have a good friend who is a mild mannered family man and all round good egg who has a galloping case of TDS. Sadly his media sources are the BBC and Guardian and he has swallowed the anti Trump narrative hook line and sinker. We can’t talk about President Trump and remain civil, so we don’t.
Have you considered the possibility that those who benefit from postal voting have used the covid debacle to advance their cause, without actually having engineered it themselves?
I’m not being pedantic. It’s just that it doesn’t make much difference whether it was engineered by them or used by them, The net effect is presumably the same. And I find people are more open to hearing “they’ve taken advantage of COVID to push postal voting” than “they engineered COVID to push postal voting.”
Sticking my neck out here, but am I the only person that doesn’t really have a problem with him. Sure, he maybe a sleazy groper and full of
- BUT, why the vitriol from everyone. The other current and past presidents and political establishment appear far worse, but with a smile of thier (2) faces. and even more full of false
.
if I was American I would vote for him, rather than Brit hater joe ninety
He’s brash, largely unapologetic, and a threat.
Not personally a fan but yes, some groups of. people seem mightily obsessed with hating on him. He reminds me of Margaret Thatcher in that way – even my parents blamed her for the destruction of British society for well over thirty years after she left office. I expect Trump will live on in the popular imagination.
We are talking about a gradual squeeze on a certain class of people and their girevance is real. The fact that they want to lash out is entirely understandable. You won’t achieve anything politically without these people on side and so at least he functioned as a point of focus for a while. The future is far more challenging. There will be very few characters who will even be able to manage it still less bring it to satisfaction. We can mock everything that went before but without a language of the future we risk being cat up on the shore. I would urge people to take these matters seriously.
Just because Trump is talked about “far more often” doesn’t mean it’s due to “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. That’s an illogical jump.
Trump’s policies did work for America’s benefit. He has a few difficult characteristics to make it difficult to love him, but that doesn’t make him an entirely bad person or president. In my opinion the Ukrainian war might not have happened had Trump been in power rather than the bafflingly uncomprehensive pathetically geriatric Bidden