Goodbye Donald J. Trump. Your Reign of Error is Over

Since your campaign for election to President of the United States in 2016, no one in history has dominated the public discourse like you did, Donald J. Trump.

Your use of Twitter to take your message directly to the people was unprecedented, to say the least. In virtually every news cycle, you could be seen and heard delivering your message, and the news media dutifully reported what you said and did, despite the fact that you had a habit of playing fast and loose with the truth. Sometimes it seemed as if was Trump Time all the time as you bombarded us constantly with whatever popped into your mind that you wanted to tell people about, especially your millions of core supporters.

However, after over four years of your particular communications tactics, it became clear that you had likely overdone things and induced in millions of people, including many of your own supporters, a type of disorder that is best called ‘Trump Overload Syndrome.’

Such a condition is not officially recognized (at least not yet) in the medical and psychological communities. Nonetheless, ‘Trump Overload Syndrome’ appears to be very real and has caused distress to a lot of people who simply have had a hard time dealing with a near-constant barrage of “in your face” messages coming from you.

Many people found themselves stressed out by all this and wished you would tone down and moderate your words and behavior. Of course, your base of core supporters, have always been much more receptive to what you say and do, and how you say and do things. After all, that particular “out of the box” communications style is a major reason they voted for you in the first place in enough numbers that got you elected in 2016. But even these core supporters often wished you'd be a bit more diplomatic at times.

One way to deal with ‘Trump Overload Syndrome’ was to cut back on one’s exposure to you. That, of course, involved reducing the amount of time a person engaged with various forms of media, especially the most common ones such as television news and newspapers, as well as social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. However, that is much easier said than done because of ingrained daily habits people have built up over time that they find very difficult to change.

Your particular style certainly worked well and very effectively for you while you were president, at least up until the waning days of your time in office. But there's no doubt that your style took a great emotional toll on millions of people by causing “Trump Overload Syndrome.”

With the arrival of the coronavirus, you hesitated the first couple of months of 2020 to take COVID-19 as seriously as most medical experts were. Eventually, the crisis grew to such proportions that you really had no choice but to give the matter the seriousness it deserved. Thus, you started having press conferences every day that lasted upwards of two hours and veered wildly offtopic, with you sounding more like you were on the campaign trail.

These daily press conferences, along with your usual “tweetstorms” every day, only served to magnify ‘Trump Overload Syndrome’ because you started to communicate even more than you used to. Even some of your staunchest supporters were saying that you were risking overexposure and a possible backlash. It didn’t help matters that while all this was going on, your poll numbers showed disapproval of the way you and your staff were handling the coronavirus response, especially after a very slow start.

Some of your closest advisers recommended that you cut back on your daily TV appearances. You did so, but only for a few days before resuming the press conferences. Clearly, being in the spotlight every day, especially since you couldn’t go out on the campaign trail at that time due to coronavirus constraints, was just too tempting to resist. So The Trump Show went on and on and on, with no clear end in sight.

However, even if your overexposure may have been hurting you, you had absolutely no intention of changing your personal and political style to accommodate anybody or anything. That’s just not in your DNA.

Your bombastic style finally caught up with you when you urged your supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue in mass and confront and disrupt Congress while its members were certifying the Electoral College results, which clearly showed that Joe Biden was the winner. Your inflammatory rhetoric induced thousands of your most radical followers to launch an insurrection on January 6th, 2021, and break into the Halls of Congress, causing multiple deaths. The treasonous actions of this mob acting under your orders only delayed the vote but did not stop it. All you accomplished that day was to cement your infamous place in American history and cause you to be impeached for the second time, something that had never happened to a president before.

With your time as president now at an end, and with you being banned for life on Twitter, you'll have a very difficult time getting your message out. However, a lot of people in America, and even around the world, would say that ‘Trump Overload Syndrome’ was definitely a real thing and affected them in a negative way. These people will likely enjoy the relative peace and quiet of not having to listen to your rantings every day.

So, Donald, good luck with your new reality of no longer being the most powerful person in the world. Your Reign of Error is now officially over.

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Thanks for reading. Copyright Terry Mansfield. All rights reserved.