Gain-of-Function TDS

identifying a new and spreading mutation

Photo by Mikita Yo on Unsplash

Yesterday, I was driving to the little general store a few miles from my house, listening to a podcast, when I heard something so astonishing — so profoundly shocking — that I had to pull over.

I sat there for a solid five minutes, just… stunned. What the Brits call gobsmacked.

I’m going to explain what I heard, why it rattled me so deeply, and what it has to do with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I am a mathematician.

That means I love numbers, number theory, and the rare satisfaction of proving something true with absolute certainty.

More than that, I love patterns. Recognizing them. Understanding them. Watching them click into place like puzzle pieces. That’s what floods my brain with dopamine.

Recently, I’ve observed an emerging pattern.

Trump Derangement Syndrome appears to have evolved, much like a virus subjected to serial passaging in Gain-of-Function research, becoming more intense.

I’m calling this new form Enhanced Virulence TDS.

What Is Trump Derangement Syndrome?

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) became a meme around 2015. It described the phenomenon — still rampant today — of otherwise rational people reacting with disproportionate outrage, fear, or scorn to anything Donald Trump said or did. The term described a consistent, predictable political overreaction: if Trump supported something, it was deemed inherently wrong. If Trump said something, it must be false — even if the exact same thing had been said by Obama, Clinton, or any other Democrat five minutes earlier.

TDS prompted people to abandon reasoned judgment. It became common to see pundits and social media users frothing with outrage over Trump policies that mirrored long-standing bipartisan norms. For instance, some who previously supported strict immigration policies began labeling border security as authoritarian or even fascist when implemented by Trump.

One of the earliest and clearest examples came during the 2016 campaign. When Trump criticized the Iraq War and mocked George W. Bush’s foreign policy record during a GOP primary debate, he was booed by the Republican establishment — yet the leftist pearl-clutching only got more intense, despite the fact of those exact same positions having been lauded by the anti-war left for over a decade.

Trump defied conventional political boundaries by blending messages in ways that defied ideological categorization, prompting emotional rather than analytical reactions from both sides.

Acknowledging A Pre-Existing Variant

The overwhelming majority of TDS occurs among people who hate Trump.

But there’s also a pro-Trump variant — a small but vocal group who believe he can do no wrong. These are the people who think every accusation is a false flag, every scandal a media hit job, and every blunder a misunderstood stroke of genius. They genuinely believe that a wealthy New York City playboy made it through the 1980s without ever cheating on his wife of the moment — and that a man who once appeared on the cover of Playboy and famously cited “Two Corinthians” is nonetheless a devout Christian chosen by God to restore American virtue.

Such unwavering, unquestioning devotion represents a distinct form of bias — pro-Trump TDS.

That said, this group is small. The broader MAGA movement is far more pragmatic. You can see this clearly in the widespread rejection of the COVID-19 vaccine among Trump supporters. Despite Trump proudly championing Operation Warp Speed, many of his supporters simply didn’t take the vaccine. Why? Because they thought for themselves.

And let’s not pretend politics didn’t shape the narrative. In 2020, Kamala Harris publicly declared she wouldn’t trust a “Trump vaccine.” A few months later, the same vaccine was repackaged under a new administration and suddenly became the moral litmus test for civic responsibility — complete with mandates (so much for “my body, my choice”) and social shaming.

Trump supporters noticed. They remembered. They watched the exact same shot go from “dangerous Republican science experiment” to “sacred civic duty” almost overnight. So they did what the left claimed to value in every other context: they did their own research. They made their own risk assessments. And then they made their own call.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge the pro-Trump strain of TDS, but the mutation I’m writing about today belongs firmly to the anti-Trump type — the one that continues to spread despite all evidence and logic.

Given the polarized nature of TDS, I feel compelled to clarify that I am not afflicted by the pro-Trump variant. I’ve criticized him and his administration multiple times — including here, here, and here.

My personal opinion of him as a man is strongly negative: I hold a negative view of his personal character, finding his behavior inconsistent with the values I would try to instill in a son or seek in a partner.

That said, I do believe the assassination attempt led to some genuine moral growth, which — regardless of politics — is a good thing for the country.

My view of him as President is mildly positive: I disagree with some of his policies, and even where I agree, I often dislike the way he implements them.

I, like the majority of Americans who voted for him, see his flaws but simply recognize that the alternative was much, much worse.

Symptoms and Patients Zero and One

The standard strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome is easy enough to diagnose. It shows up when a completely reasonable distaste for Trump’s personal flaws — his serial adultery, his narcissism, or his infamous comment on live television, on September 11, 2001, that he now owned the tallest building in New York City — mutates into a kind of full-body allergic reaction that disables rational political thought.

You’ll spot it in the belief that he was (or still is) going to create concentration camps for homosexuals, despite being a flamboyant New York real estate mogul whose properties have likely been styled by more gay men than an Elton John farewell tour.

Or in the endlessly repeated claim that he called white nationalists “very fine people” — a lie that only appears to work if you clip the quote just before he says, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

That’s baseline TDS. It’s not harmless, but it’s treatable.

Extreme Virulence TDS is the gain-of-function mutation. This version doesn’t just impair reasoning — it rewires symbolic perception entirely.

Anything perceived to be even tangentially related to Trump becomes so morally radioactive that real-world abuses of power are minimized, ignored, or outright excused in comparison.

Andrew Sullivan, once a model of civil discourse and principled liberalism, now breaks out in ideological hives over symbolic Trump-adjacent infractions.

Think about this, y’all.

For four years, this country endured a coup. We don’t know who was exercising executive power, but we can be certain of two things:

1. It wasn’t the guy we elected; he was non compos mentis.

2. The Democratic establishment helped cover up both the coup and the elder abuse that enabled it.

That is treason. Actual, definitional treason. If “protecting the Constitution” still meant anything, the calls for investigation, prosecution, and prison would be nonstop.

But let Steve Bannon — an oaf with no office, no mandate, and no authority — say something idiotic about Trump running for a third term, and Sullivan reacts like he’s discovered a sleeper cell of fascists plotting in the basement of Mar-a-Lago.

What makes this Extreme Virulence TDS — and not just “whataboutism” — is that the comparison isn’t apples to oranges. It’s apples to apples: treason vs. treason.

The outrage, however, is reserved exclusively for the version with even the faintest Trump odor on it.

That’s the pathology: when symbolic gestures tied to Trump provoke far more fury than actual violations of democratic norms and constitutional authority.

And that brings us to Sam Harris — and the moment I had to pull over, not because I was in danger, but because I needed a minute to absorb what I’d just heard.

Maybe Impossible to Exaggerate

Here are two clips from a recent podcast interview Sam Harris gave — one he recorded on someone else’s show, then re-released as the latest episode of his own.

This clip is the one that diagnoses Extreme Virulence TDS, based on the statement (about Trump): “Any sort of Buddhist imagining that on some level he’s in pain is actually not true.” I had my clip guy¹ grab a long clip for better context, and you can watch the whole thing here.

In the second clip, he declares Trump to be “obviously barely human.”

If you haven’t studied Buddhism, it may be hard to grasp just how extraordinary Sam Harris’s statement in the first clip is — and why the “barely human” line in the second only drives the point further home.

To claim one person is exempt from Buddhist ideas of suffering is like declaring: “The First Noble Truth? Sure, it covers all sentient beings — except, y’know, Trump.”

To put this in terms more familiar to most Americans: imagine that a widely respected Christian theologian — someone with a massive following built on books, sermons, and lectures about grace, compassion, and the radical inclusivity of God’s love — announced that there was one currently living human being to whom the death of Jesus did not apply as the route to salvation.

One person God didn’t love.

One soul for whom the blood of Christ was not sufficient atonement.

All Christians — and really, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Christian doctrine — would recognize this as heresy.

It doesn’t just bend theology. It obliterates it.

To claim that someone is outside the reach of God’s mercy — that the power of Christ’s blood is simply too weak to save that person — is to deny the very foundation of the faith.

Might you be tempted to say that such a Christian held a deranged view of the person they singled out?

That’s what Sam Harris did — only in Buddhist terms.

To anyone familiar with even the basics of Buddhist psychology, it’s jaw-dropping. The First Noble Truth — that life is characterized by dukkha, or suffering — is not conditional. It doesn’t pause for political enemies.

It applies to everyone. And dukkha isn’t about looking miserable or saying you’re unhappy. It’s about the internal mechanics of craving, clinging, ego, and delusion — all of which Trump exhibits in textbook abundance.

That’s why he’s so easily manipulated by flattery. Why he so often overreacts to perceived slights. Why he cannot admit error and needs to win every interaction, even when there’s nothing to win. That is dukkha — plain and simple.

What Harris essentially said was: the First Noble Truth applies to all sentient beings…except this one.

And that’s when we tumble into Enhanced Virulence TDS — a mental and spiritual meltdown so intense it torches the core truths of your own worldview just to fuel the Trump-hate bonfire.

In Sam’s case, this means throwing out everything he learned traveling with the Dalai Lama, everything he teaches in his mindfulness courses, everything he says in his own meditation app — all of it discarded for one exception: Donald Trump.

Sam Harris is not alone. Andrew Sullivan suffers from the same mutation. He ignores an actual soft coup carried out by unelected officials usurping executive power, while melting down over Steve Bannon’s idiotic fanboy bluster about Trump running for a third term — a comment that, while dumb, carries no legal force and came from a man who holds no office.

This isn’t limited to intellectuals. Politicians and media figures are infected too.

Take Adam Schiff — a man who went on national television dozens of times to claim he had direct evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, which he never produced. That lie helped fuel years of institutional paralysis and public hysteria. Yet it’s Bannon who gets branded the existential threat for spouting nonsense on a comedian’s talk show.

That’s Enhanced Virulence TDS. Not just disliking Trump. Not disagreeing with his policies. Not even harboring a deep, visceral loathing of the man.

It’s losing all perspective — moral, spiritual, and political — the moment his name enters the frame. It's when criticism becomes compulsion, and hatred becomes a kind of holy exemption from everything that, in all other areas of life, you actually believe.

And the damage doesn’t end with Trump. The real casualty is discernment.

Because once you’ve decided that this one man is so singularly dangerous, so cosmically exceptional, so metaphysically unique, that your own deeply and dearly held principles no longer apply — you haven’t just lost the argument.

You’ve lost the plot.

How TDS Got Juiced: Gain of Function Through Serial Passaging

So how did this happen? How did ordinary TDS mutate into Extreme Virulence TDS?

In virology, serial passaging is a technique where a virus is deliberately introduced into a new host — a dish of cells, a lab animal, something just different enough to provoke an evolutionary response.

The virus replicates.

Then it’s extracted and introduced into another host.

Then another. And another.

With each round, selective pressure forces the virus to adapt. Most mutations go nowhere, but some make the virus more contagious, more resilient, more dangerous.

That’s the heart of gain-of-function research: start with a tame virus and, through repeated tweaks under the right conditions, amp up its danger — maybe its spread, maybe its bite.

In theory, it’s done to anticipate pandemics. In practice, it can go very wrong — as the world learned all too well in 2020. A virus enhanced in a lab can escape that lab. And when it does, the damage can’t be undone.

That is, metaphorically, what happened with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The original strain was uncomfortable and odd but not insane.

People didn’t like the man. Fair enough — plenty of reasons not to.

But then came the outrage cycles. The hashtags. The saturation. The endless ritualistic condemnation.

And with every fresh passage — every new outrage amplified, every clip taken out of context and passed from journalist to pundit to friend to feed — the virus adapted. It got sharper.

More emotionally manipulative.

More resistant to facts.

It developed enhanced function: not just disliking Trump, but abandoning long-held principles whenever Trump was involved — or, as the Bannon example shows, even when something merely feels Trump-adjacent.

Eventually, it leaked. It escaped containment — from thinkpieces and podcasts into courts, classrooms, newsrooms, and even sacred spaces.

• The mindfulness teacher says Trump doesn’t suffer.

• The liberal constitutionalist decides censorship is acceptable — as long as it targets the right.

• The journalist who once warned against intelligence overreach now applauds CIA briefings to Twitter.

The infection spread beyond politics and into epistemology — not just what people think, but what they believe it is even possible to know.

And what they will even permit themselves to consider.

This is how we got from “he’s unfit for office” to “he doesn’t count as a person” — or, to use Sam Harris’s phrasing, he’s “barely human.”

Not overnight. Not from a single trigger. But through hundreds of iterations, under just the right conditions, in just the right media ecosystem, until the thing mutated.

And then it leaked.

We’re not dealing with the old TDS anymore. This is the souped-up strain — wildly contagious, shrugging off reason, and still mutating like crazy.

And it’s spreading.

The conditions that allowed this mutation to form are still present — maybe even more so.

The pressure to signal moral clarity through overreaction hasn’t subsided.

The algorithms still reward performative outrage.

And new hosts — cultural, intellectual, spiritual — are still lining up to be infected.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that hysterias don’t burn themselves out.

They escalate until reality reasserts itself — or crashes through the wall someone else built to contain it.

Inoculation and Recovery

I’d love to end this with a call to action. A ten-point plan.

A spiritual vaccine, so to speak.

But I don’t think inoculation is possible anymore, really. At least, not at scale, and not with this mutation. The thing is too entrenched and spreading too fast.

Trump Derangement Syndrome, through gain-of-function serial passaging, has quite literally become its own self-perpetuating reward system.

And Trump — in his infinite lack of discipline, his conscious enjoyment of being a chaos-producing machine — doesn’t help. He keeps supplying fresh material.

Because let’s be honest: when someone you irrationally hate actually does something objectionable, it’s euphoric. It’s a hit. It’s a righteous high. It feels earned. You get to rage, and this time it’s not even technically a slip.

It’s like a drug addict who has dental surgery — the Vicodin is prescribed, the pain is real, and no one can call it a relapse. But it’s still the same chemical pathway. Still the same pleasure circuit.

Still the same dependency — only now, with moral justification.

To be clear, I’m not saying everything Trump does is terrible — or even that I disagree with most of what he’s doing. But the chaos he generates, intentionally or not, creates so much noise that even good actions become hard to interpret charitably. He muddies the signal.

And when you’re already primed to expect evil, uncertainty looks an awful lot like confirmation.

So no, I don’t think there’s a path to recovery. Not broadly. Not culturally. Not yet.

But naming the pattern? That’s something.

That’s my job.

I’m a mathematician. I don’t need the answer to be pretty. I need it to hold.

And when you abandon truth for a dopamine loop dressed up as righteousness, you’re not just losing credibility — you’re surrendering your ability to see reality without a kaleidoscope.

And when millions of people do that at once, it doesn’t just distort the culture — it infects it.

Most pandemics are overestimated in the beginning.

This one might be far worse than it looks.

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1. If you need clips for whatever reason,

J. Daniel Sawyer

does good work.