The Politics of Pathology
Before facing felony charges for soliciting a minor, Senator Eichorn sought to diagnose Trump critics—and resurrected a dangerous historical tactic
The pickup truck eased into Bloomington's commercial district on a Monday in March, its driver unaware that police officers were watching.
Justin Eichorn, a forty-year-old Republican state senator from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, had come seeking what he believed would be an encounter with a sixteen-year-old girl. The encounter had been arranged through messages with someone Eichorn thought was a teenager offering sex for money.
The teenager was, in fact, a detective.
"As a 40-year-old man, if you come to the Orange Jumpsuit District looking to have sex with someone's child, you can expect that we are going to lock you up," Bloomington police chief Booker Hodges said in a statement, as reported by the New York Times.
Eichorn now faces a felony charge carrying up to five years in prison.
Until his arrest, Eichorn had been building a reputation as a champion of traditional values in Minnesota's closely divided legislature.
Just last month, as CBS Minnesota reported, he had authored an opinion piece emphasizing the legislature's duty to "strengthen families, empower parents and crack down on rampant fraud." According to Axios Twin Cities, he had vocally demanded the resignation of Democratic Senator Nicole Mitchell after her arrest on burglary charges last year.
But Eichorn had attracted particular attention recently as co-sponsor of what may be one of the most peculiar pieces of legislation in Minnesota's history.
In early March, Eichorn and four Republican colleagues introduced bill SF 2589, proposing to add "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to the state's official list of mental illnesses. Under their proposed legislation, the condition would be defined as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump." The diagnostic criteria would include "verbal expressions of intense hostility toward President Donald J. Trump" and "overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting President Donald J. Trump."
Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy called it "wasteful, frivolous and shameful" and "possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history," adding that "if the authors are serious, it is an affront to free speech and an expression of a dangerous level of loyalty to an authoritarian president." Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson described it as "a little bit tongue in cheek," calling it a response to Democrats who had been "railroading our committees by talking about Trump more than they have been talking about the deficit."
The bill had virtually no chance of advancing in Minnesota's divided legislature. Like many legislative proposals introduced primarily for symbolic or political purposes, it seemed destined to die in committee, a footnote in the state's political history. But the timing of Eichorn's arrest has cast the legislation in a harsher light, raising questions about the weaponization of psychiatric terminology for political purposes.
This practice has unsettling historical precedents.
In July 1937, Nazi Germany mounted the infamous "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich. Works by renowned modernist artists hung haphazardly on walls adorned with mocking slogans. In one particularly insidious gallery, paintings by professional artists were juxtaposed with drawings by psychiatric patients, with text taunting visitors to distinguish between them.
The exhibition was a calculated psychological operation deployed by the Nazi government and designed to manipulate public perception. Every aspect of the presentation was engineered to create revulsion and cognitive association between modern art, mental illness, and racial inferiority.
While the concurrent "Great German Art Exhibition" was displayed in the spacious, well-lit halls of the newly built House of German Art, "degenerate" works were crammed into narrow, poorly lit rooms of the Archaeological Institute. Paintings hung at odd angles, some deliberately unframed or partially covered by derogatory texts.
The psychological assault was relentless. Inflammatory slogans surrounded the artworks: "Madness becomes method," "Nature as seen by sick minds," "Revelation of the Jewish racial soul," "An insult to German womanhood," "How sick minds viewed nature," "Deliberate sabotage of national defense", and so on. Near Otto Dix's war paintings, text proclaimed: "This is how diseased minds saw the World War." Beside abstract works, viewers read: "The ideal—cretin and whore." The exhibition catalog described the artists as "products of insanity, impudence, and lack of talent."
This deliberate framing created a false syllogism: if these works resembled those created by mental patients, and if these artists were predominantly Jewish or "racially degenerate" (as the Nazis falsely claimed), then both modern art and these racial groups must be products of mental defect. The entire exhibition was structured as a form of psychological conditioning, designed to train the public to associate modernism with degeneracy and mental illness.
The exhibition represented more than aesthetic criticism—it was a calculated first step in a broader strategy of persecution. By framing modernism as symptomatic of mental defect rather than legitimate artistic innovation, the Nazis established a crucial psychological foundation: once the public accepted that certain forms of expression indicated mental degeneracy, it became easier to extend this logic to the creators themselves. This deliberate pathologization served as cognitive scaffolding for escalating persecution.
When a group is first classified as mentally defective, their mistreatment becomes more palatable to the general population—their humanity diminished through pseudo-medical language. The stigmatization of both artists and people with psychiatric conditions wasn't merely coincidental; it was preparatory work for their later systematic exclusion, imprisonment, and, ultimately, extermination. The exhibition helped construct what Arendt would later call "the banality of evil"—a framework where extraordinary cruelty could be normalized through bureaucratic and clinical language.
The effects rippled outward with devastating speed. The Nazi regime confiscated approximately twenty thousand modernist works from state museums between 1937 and 1938—roughly one-fifth of modern art in German public collections. Artists deemed "degenerate" faced professional devastation: banned from teaching positions, prohibited from exhibiting, and, in some cases, forbidden from purchasing art supplies.
This designation triggered an exodus of artistic talent. Prominent figures including Max Beckmann, George Grosz, and Wassily Kandinsky fled Germany, creating a cultural "brain drain" that would be felt for generations. Museum directors who had championed modern art were summarily dismissed, replaced by party loyalists. The Berlin Academy of Arts was purged of "undesirable" faculty and restructured to promote state-approved aesthetics glorifying German values, rural life, and racial "purity."
With cynical pragmatism, the Nazi regime turned cultural persecution into profit. Many confiscated works were sold at international auctions, primarily to foreign buyers. The notorious Galerie Fischer auction in Lucerne in 1939 sold modernist masterpieces at severely depressed prices, with proceeds funding the Nazi war machine. Works that would later be worth millions were liquidated for a fraction of their value.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the Nazi stigmatization ultimately increased interest in modernist works outside Germany. Post-war, these formerly "degenerate" works became some of the most valuable art in the world. The label of "degenerate," originally intended as condemnation, became in many ways a mark of historical significance.
However, the mass confiscation created enduring challenges. The 2012 discovery of the Gurlitt hoard—over fourteen hundred works, many designated as "degenerate"—demonstrated how these issues persist nearly a century later. Museums worldwide continue to grapple with Nazi-era provenance issues, facing complex legal and ethical questions about rightful ownership.
Most significantly, the Nazi campaign against "degenerate art" has become a powerful symbol of the dangers of authoritarian control over culture. Post-war Germany developed strong institutional protections for artistic freedom as a direct response. The principle of "Kunstfreiheit" (artistic freedom) is enshrined in Germany's Basic Law.
When controversial art faces public criticism today, the specter of Entartete Kunst is frequently invoked as a cautionary tale.
As we now know, the Degenerate Art exhibition served as overture to a more sinister movement. While the Nazis worked to purify German culture of "degeneracy," they simultaneously targeted the people they deemed "life unworthy of life." The same pseudoscientific theories justifying the confiscation of paintings provided rationale for the persecution of people with mental illnesses.
This persecution evolved systematically after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. That July, the regime passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, allowing forced sterilization of people with conditions deemed hereditary, including schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, and severe alcoholism. By 1939, approximately 300,000-400,000 people had been forcibly sterilized under this law—the largest such program in the world at that time.
Daily life for those with mental illness deteriorated rapidly. Many were removed from their families and communities. Psychiatric hospitals transitioned from places of care to facilities of confinement. Patients' food rations were progressively reduced. Treatments became punitive rather than therapeutic, with some subjected to experimental procedures without consent.
In September 1939, Hitler authorized what would become known as the T4 euthanasia program, named for its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. The order was backdated to September 1st—the day World War II began—in an attempt to frame murder as a wartime necessity. The first victims were children with disabilities, followed by a rapid expansion to include adults.
Six designated killing centers were established across Germany and Austria. Victims were transported from institutions across the country, often told they were being transferred for better treatment. Instead, they were killed by carbon monoxide gas or lethal injection. Families received falsified death certificates citing natural causes.
After public protests led by religious leaders like Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster, Hitler officially halted the program in August 1941. However, the killings continued more secretively in what historians call "wild euthanasia," with methods shifting to deliberate starvation, overdoses, and lethal injections administered in existing psychiatric institutions.
Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 275,000-300,000 people with mental illnesses and disabilities were systematically murdered. Patients were portrayed not as human beings deserving care but as economic burdens whose elimination would benefit society.
How did ordinary Germans respond to these developments? Most adapted gradually to each escalation through psychological mechanisms that remain disturbingly familiar today.
Many experienced cognitive dissonance–discomfort from holding contradictory beliefs. To resolve the tension between their self-image as decent people and the indecent acts occurring around them, they developed rationalizations: "These measures are unfortunate but necessary" or "The authorities know what they're doing."
Fear silenced potential opposition. The regime swiftly punished dissent, creating what historian Robert Gellately called a "self-policing society." When Protestant Pastor Paul Gerhard Braune protested the killing of mental patients, the Gestapo promptly arrested him. Few others risked such consequences.
Perhaps most significantly, many Germans engaged in what historian Mary Fulbrook termed "knowing without acknowledging"–a form of deliberate ignorance that served as psychological self-protection. The Nazi regime facilitated this by using euphemistic language and conducting operations with discretion.
After the war, this psychological evasion continued. While other Nazi atrocities were confronted, the persecution of people with mental illness remained largely unacknowledged. As noted by the New York Times, "Few of the doctors involved in the operation were convicted, and families have never been eligible for any form of postwar compensation." Many doctors involved continued their careers, and some sterilization laws remained on the books in West Germany until 1988. It wasn't until 1990, forty-five years after the war's end, that the first memorial to T4 victims was erected, which remained a small plaque at a Berlin bus stop until the German government expanded the memorial site in September 2014.
The Minnesota bill's attempt to classify political opposition as mental illness shares disturbing parallels with this history, albeit on an incomparably smaller scale. Both transform political or aesthetic disagreement into a medical condition. Both potentially stigmatize legitimate mental health conditions. Both represent what philosopher Hannah Arendt might recognize as attempts to shatter "our categories of thought and standards of judgment."
This attempt to legislate a mental illness diagnosis particularly stands out for its subversion of established medical processes. In modern psychiatric practice, conditions are added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) through rigorous scientific investigation, extensive peer review, clinical studies, and expert consensus. The American Psychiatric Association's process for recognizing new disorders requires demonstrable evidence that a condition causes significant distress or impairment, has validity supported by research, and can be reliably diagnosed.
The "Trump Derangement Syndrome" bill seeks to circumvent this scientific process entirely, imposing a politically defined condition through legislative fiat. This approach parallels how Nazi Germany forced physicians to abandon medical ethics in favor of political ideology—compelling doctors to diagnose and treat according to state-mandated theories rather than scientific evidence.
If enacted, the bill's consequences would extend far beyond symbolic politics.
By formally amending Minnesota's legal definition of mental illness, it would potentially affect healthcare coverage, child custody determinations, employment opportunities, and even Second Amendment rights—as those diagnosed with mental illness can face restrictions on firearm ownership under both federal and state law. Mental health professionals would face an impossible ethical dilemma: follow state law by diagnosing a condition their profession doesn't recognize, or adhere to scientific standards and risk professional consequences. Perhaps most insidiously, the bill's vague language, which cites "verbal expressions of intense hostility" as symptomatic, creates a mechanism to potentially classify protected political speech as evidence of mental disorder, establishing a dangerous precedent for pathologizing dissent.
Such an approach to classifying protected speech as symptomatic of mental illness raises constitutional questions that strain credulity, even in this era of increasingly elastic interpretations of the founding document.
What connects these disparate historical moments is the weaponization of psychiatric language for political purposes. This strategy undermines both democratic discourse and legitimate mental health care. When all criticism becomes symptomatic, meaningful political debate becomes impossible. When psychiatric terminology is deployed against political opponents, those with genuine mental health conditions suffer increased stigma.
The irony of Senator Eichorn's arrest, coming so soon after his promotion of legislation that would pathologize political dissent, is difficult to ignore. Here is a lawmaker who, while sponsoring a bill to classify opposition to Trump as a mental disorder, has himself allegedly engaged in behavior that violates both legal boundaries and the moral standards he publicly championed.
Senate Republicans have called for Eichorn's immediate resignation. "We are shocked by these reports," their statement reads, "and this alleged conduct demands an immediate resignation. Justin has a difficult road ahead and he needs to focus on his family." The Minnesota DFL Party demanded he step down as well, with executive director Heidi Kraus Kaplan stating, "No one who solicits children belongs anywhere near public office or the State Capitol."
As Eichorn awaits formal charges in Hennepin County, the bill he co-sponsors remains technically active, though essentially dead. Its introduction serves as a reminder that certain rhetorical strategies, particularly those seeking to transform political opposition into pathology, carry troubling historical baggage and have no place in our democracy.
The space between political disagreement and psychiatric disorder exists for good reason. Within that gap resides the essential tensions of democracy: freedom to dissent, to express outrage, to voice opposition without being labeled as ill or incapacitated.
When we allow that space to collapse—whether through the machinery of state violence as in Nazi Germany or through lesser means, such as the ill-conceived legislation in Minnesota—we diminish not just our politics but our fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.
Thank you, Jackie - another excellent substack post.
The party of Christian values seems to lack any. Yet here we are again... not a drag queen in sight.