Annie Pfeifer has a problem. Her three-year-old daughter is “obsessed with Donald Trump.”
Normally this would just be considered childish whimsy - as Pfeifer notes, the name "Donald Trump" is similar to Donald Duck, and children love alliteration. But Pfeiffer is an assistant professor in the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies at Tufts University. To a liberal like her, President Trump is evil.
But let Pfeifer explain, as she did on July 20 in the New York Times:
My 3-year-old daughter is obsessed with Donald Trump.
This is a problem if 1) you live in New York City, 2) you are liberal, 3) your friends are liberal, 4) your daughter attends a liberal school and 5) your relatives are affected by the Trump administration’s travel ban.
Pfeifer explains that her daughter, Yassi, “attends the kind of school that made counseling available in the wake of the 2016 presidential elections."
"Parents stood together comforting one another on Nov. 9 in an act of collective mourning that I hadn’t seen since Sept. 11," she recalls. "This is probably exactly the type of school that the Trump voters were hating on with their epic middle finger raised to the elites of this country.”
Furthermore, "Yassi’s father is Iranian-Canadian and was affected by the first travel ban, which included permanent residents from the blacklisted countries. For several weeks, he was forced to cancel business trips overseas for fear of being denied re-entry to the United States."
Somehow, as it was repeated ad nauseam throughout her liberal home and progressive social circles, Yassi became obsessed with saying the name "Donald Trump" in response to...well, just about everything.
Clearly, young Yassi needs some reeducation.
However, she may already have helped "woke" herself. For the Persian New Year, in March, Yassi’s grandparents gave her twin baby dolls. Yassi named the dolls "Donald Trump" and "Mustache" (which Pfeifer claims is her daughter's own strange derivation of "Hairy Clinton," as "Hillary" was difficult for the three-year-old to pronounce).
Pfeifer laments, “So we bathed Donald Trump, dressed Donald Trump in his blue overalls and then gently put Donald Trump to bed next to his twin….With his blinking blue eyes and small tuft of blond hair, baby Donald Trump seemed more like a joke than a threat to the world order."
"As Sigmund Freud theorized, by turning something threatening into a game, we rob it of its power over us. In this way, play transforms a passive experience into an active one, allowing the child to gain mastery over a threat. Yassi was onto something,” she continued.
Yes - that her mother suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome.