When I see people in the grips of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I wonder if their brain function vanished before or after the syndrome set in.

I’m being completely serious with the question I posed in my post title — Were people with Trump Derangement Syndrome always intellectually deficient? Was it just that we didn’t really notice it before or has Trump Derangement Syndrome actually affected their intellectual capacity at a profound biological level?

I ask because I found myself in conversation today with a very nice woman a little older than I. She was making noises about the frustrations of dealing with inefficient government bureaucracies and the sheep-like tendency of the British. Based upon those comments, I thought, “I wonder why I haven’t seen her in conservative circles here. They’re certainly small enough for us to have met before.”

However, when the woman went on to describe her career in academia, I decided I’d been too quick to assume that she might be a conservative because academia and conservativism don’t go well together.

As it is, I no longer refer to college grads as “educated.” I simply call them “credentialed.” They are very seldom educated, if that term refers to someone with a significant breadth and depth of knowledge, a familiarity with the Western canon that shaped our modern world, and the ability to analyze information in a rigorous, logical way.

College grads from the last 30 years are, instead, indoctrinated into all of the usual Leftist shibboleths: Race obsessions, an abiding commitment to increasingly discredited anthropogenic climate change theories, and magical thinking about biological sex. (My current shtick, when I hear people insisting that surgery and hormones will “change” a person’s sex is to say that’s like treating anorexia with diet pills and liposuction. Conservatives laugh; Progressives are offended.)

That’s why I laugh when I’m told that Trump voters are “stupid” because they didn’t go to college. To my way of thinking, they’re smart because they saved the money and they’re wise because their brains haven’t been rotted. Their common sense will still be in play when those engineering graduates who have been freed from the cruel, racist, and sexist dictates of traditional mathematical exactitude are designing bridges and buildings that routinely fall down.

Anyway, once I heard about this friendly woman’s academic background, I got a bad feeling. That’s why it was no surprise at all when, completely out of the blue, she announced that Trump is a dangerous tyrant. I couldn’t resist. “What’s he done that’s tyrannical?” I asked.

After a few more fulminations on his part, I got the list of Trump’s tyrannical activities:

He sent the military to guard our Southern border. He did not work in a bipartisan way to appoint Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. He urged Americans to vote for Republicans in the last election.

The woman to whom I spoke was very nice, showed common sense about government and herd behavior, and was old enough to have received a fairly traditional education, one that wasn’t too infused with hardcore Leftist propaganda. Yet her Trump Derangement Syndrome was such she could seriously assert the above as “proof” that we have a “tyrannical” president. And that is what led to my opening questioning: Was she always that lacking in knowledge and common sense, with the TDS merely revealing these deficiencies or did TDS actually rot her brain?