Anyone who publicly doubts the actions or opinions of President Trump is swiftly accused of being mad. ‘You have Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ I am often told by Mr Trump’s many hyped-up supporters.

Mr Trump himself has descended to this level. In December 2025, he posted on Truth Social about the violent death of one of his prominent critics, Hollywood director Rob Reiner, saying

Mr Reiner died due to ‘his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome’ (he wrote the last three words in block capitals). He described TDS as a ‘raging obsession’ and ‘paranoia.’

This is graceless, rude and stupid, and a very low form of argument. If people who behave like this get into power, they are especially dangerous.

Fanatics, usually on the Left, have often had a nasty habit of claiming that their opponents are crazy. In the Soviet Union this was taken to its bitter limit. Opponents of the regime were forced into horrible locked wards and pumped full of poisonous drugs. This remains one of the worst crimes of Communism.

It takes other forms. In the US presidential election of 1964, the highly conservative Republican, Barry Goldwater, campaigned on the slogan ‘In your heart, you know he’s right’. Liberals responded by saying ‘In your guts, you know he’s nuts’.

The incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, ran a famous TV commercial which suggested that Goldwater would start a nuclear war if elected.

A short-lived magazine, called Fact, printed a cover story on the eve of the polls, proclaiming the results of a survey: ‘1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to be President!’

Since then, the ‘Goldwater Rule’ has stated that it is unethical for psychiatrists to offer a professional opinion on the mental health of a public figure they have not personally examined and who has not consented. And quite right too.

I don’t think people who disagree with me are mad. But those who call Mr Trump’s critics ‘deranged’ are treading a dangerous path.

What if those critics respond in kind and try to remove the President, as they might do under the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution? The difficulties of responsible men confronted with an erratic chief are cleverly explored in Herman Wouk’s superb novel The Caine Mutiny, filmed with Humphrey Bogart starring as the questionable US Navy officer Philip Francis Queeg.

Queeg is a martinet and a bad seaman. He blames his mistakes on subordinates. He hides from danger during combat.

He orders a ludicrous investigation into the disappearance of a few strawberries. He all but turns his ship upside down in the midst of war to discover the culprit.

Finally, he appears to his officers to be making a bad mistake on the bridge during a furious storm. So they remove him, apparently according to the rules.

But it is they who end up on trial, and it is only when Queeg breaks down, quite piteously, on the witness stand, that they win a dismal victory, of which most of them are ashamed.

I fear this is all going to end very badly.

Splat! Tory grandee’s forensic mauling of Letby case police chief

Did Cheshire Police make the nurse Lucy Letby their chief suspect before they had properly investigated the causes of multiple baby deaths in the Countess of Chester Hospital?

This is one of the key issues in an astounding public quarrel between former Tory Cabinet minister Sir David Davis and Cheshire’s Chief Constable, Mark Roberts. I have never seen anything like this in half a century as a reporter.

DING! Sir David recently used a House of Commons debate to accuse Cheshire Police of failing to keep an open mind, as they are legally obliged to do, during their probe into the baby deaths.

DONG! The police replied with general claims that a ‘core group of individuals’ were working on behalf of Ms Letby. They said they were trying ‘to destroy reputations’ and spread ‘misinformation’.

DING! Sir David demanded that it substantiated its ‘misinformation’ claim.  Sir David wrote to Mr Roberts: ‘If you or your constabulary believe that you now have any specific rebuttals to any of the points I raised, I would like to receive them in full.’

DONG! Mr Roberts then sent another rather mysterious letter to Sir David. It is mysterious because Cheshire Police wouldn’t show it to me, saying it was private. But a complete copy of it (weirdly, it is on unheaded paper) has appeared on the website of the distinguished legal affairs commentator Joshua Rozenberg.

SPLAT! Back came Sir David, with a steely, forensic takedown of one of the Chief Constable’s main claims – that Ms Letby was not designated a suspect until June 2018. If so, that would have been

13 months after the start of Operation Hummingbird, the name given by police to the investigation of the Chester hospital deaths. Plenty of time for open-minded inquiries, eh? Or perhaps not. Sir David retorted: ‘You state “Operation Hummingbird commenced in May 2017, and it was not until more than a year later, in June 2018, that Letby was designated a suspect.”

'But on 15 May 2017, hospital consultants and Cheshire Police officers met to discuss the case. Sir David pointed out ‘the Thirlwall Inquiry, document INQ0102309, makes plain that at this meeting, the allegations focused on a particular nurse, named explicitly as Lucy Letby.’

And there is much more in the same vein. I’d say about five-nil to Sir David, but then, after nearly two years exploring this case, I am ever more convinced that the Letby verdict is unsafe and should go back before the courts – and soon.

Ms Letby is now 36 and her chances of resuming anything like a full life dwindle by the day. If she is in fact innocent, this is quite unbearable.