When I drive home from church, I drive past a house that has a crude wooden sign nailed to a tree in the backyard. 

The sign reads “Got TDS? Move to Ireland.” 

I don’t get the Ireland reference but the sign makes me think about Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is evidently what one has if they disagree with President Trump.

There are other symptoms of derangement that I find far more disturbing.

There are now 14 million undocumented people living in the United States.  About 8.3 million of them are working, representing almost 5 percent of the U.S. workforce. 

Masked federal agents are increasingly snatching brown people off the streets – presumably on the basis they are criminal and violent.  Often, these agents are wrong and resistant to correct their mistakes. This will increase as our government is spending billions of dollars to hire and train thousands more masked men.

I try to stay informed and I cannot find an answer from our government as to who we are deporting or not. 

Are we deporting all 14 million? What impact will this have on our economy?  If we are not deporting all, what is the basis for allowing some to stay? How are we discerning who stays and who must go? How did the deportation of orphan minors get to the top of the list?

It is real derangement to think this is a carefully thought-out, necessary exodus rather than a discriminatory, anti-Christian and undemocratic purge.

FOX News paid $787 million to settle a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems.  In essence, FOX admitted it was more important to broadcast what their audience wanted to hear rather than the truth.  FOX has not yet settled with Smartmatic Voting Systems.  Newsmax paid $67 million to Dominion and $46 million to Smartmatic for the same lies.

It is real derangement to consider either news network a reliable source of truthful information.

For 200-plus years, our nation has had almost universal clarity as to the power of our executive branch – our president – vs. our legislative and judicial branches of government. For the past eight months, a toady Congress has abdicated most of its power to Trump. With rare exceptions, our courts are rendering obtuse, illogical decisions validating Trump’s ongoing power grab.

In crafting our Constitution, one of the biggest concerns was limiting the power of the president, having just thrown off the yoke of King George. It is real derangement to think Trump’s expansion of executive power is Constitutional or even necessary under illusional fictional emergencies. 

Do you really think we have been clueless the past 200 years about the limitations of presidential power?  Real patriots understand the distinctions between a dictatorship and a democracy.

Conservative states are passing new laws creating heavier burdens to prove you have a right to vote.  In Illinois, we use your signature to verify you are a registered voter.  I defy anyone to come to my house and try and sign in to vote as me. 

We’ll compare the signatures and know you are the fraud.

That’s how simple it is to verify legitimate voters.  It works well with mail ballots, too. It is real derangement to think this process is ripe with fraud, or to think new ID burdens are anything but an attempt to restrict voting rights.

Since our beginning, we have been very reluctant to use our military at home.  That started with memories of having to house British soldiers prior to our revolution. 

Historically, we have used our military only to resist insurrections. We fought a civil war.  Lincoln used troops to suppress a draft riot during that war.  Grant used federal troops to suppress unlawful Ku Klux Klan activities after the war. Kennedy and Johnson used troops to enforce civil rights in states of the former Confederacy.  

President Trump should have called for the military to protect Congress on Jan. 6, 2020, instead of just watching on TV.

Dictators use their military against their own people to impose their will.  It is real derangement to think Trump’s use of our military is justified or Constitutional. It is what it looks like, another tin pot dictator at work.

Syndromes are notable by key symptoms.  The real derangement syndrome is finding any of what’s going on logical, Constitutional or acceptable.  What these symptoms really tell us is we have an ignorant, self-glorifying narcissistic clown as our president, empowered by a feckless Congress and Supreme Court, sustained by conservative media who would rather lie than lose their audience.

I hope the country I love can survive this national mental illness.