Fresh on the heels of its scoop about women who cut off their hair to teach Trump a lesson, New York magazine is back with Phase Two in its stirring Stress-and-Grief-Management series, this time with eight therapists dealing with cases of Trump-Based dementia, as afflicting their clients and them. All, it appears, can barely stop sobbing, including the doctors. “Trump’s election was a death of a sort to me and my clients,” said one of them. “I was crying frequently … been VERY careful to restrict my conversations to people who share my political ‘views.'” “I allowed myself to be with my clients, and cry with them,” said another. “I wanted them to know … I was just as scared and anxious as they.” Patients dressed in black, threatened suicide, displayed “agitation and fearfulness,” and regressed in their efforts to tame their addictions. Some clients, doctors reported, indulged in orgies of binging and purging. These patients themselves were regarded as blameless. “I blame the election,” one doctor had said.

When did it become okay (at least among Democrats) for adults to admit, out loud and in public, how weak they all were, how helpless they were, how unable they were to deal with reversals, and how quickly they fold in the clutch? It was not always thus. In the Times of London, Douglas Murray compares an American student who spent a week in the hospital after reading a novel assigned in one of her classes to an answer by the current Countess Mountbatten — “One simply got on with it,” — to a question about how she coped with the IRA bombing that thirty-six years earlier had nearly killed her and had indeed killed her father, one of her children, and one of that child’s friends. Can Americans hope to live up this standard? Thus far, at least, the Republicans have failed to give in to this syndrome. And, contra the student, and vide Countess Mountbatten, we have our two Jackies, and John.