Several readers have written lately to accuse me of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS).

Among the accusers is Mike, an old friend of my late brother, Jim. As I respect Mike, I give weight to what he says. He just happens to look at the world in a different way than I do, which is OK by me.

And as my self-knowledge is incomplete and will always be so, I have to allow that perhaps the accusation has some truth to it. After all, I have spilled a lot of ink, so to speak, in this column criticizing the president and his administration.

But I must say something here: this so-called TDS cuts both ways. One can be deranged, for or against.

Yes, there are many people on the left who hate, hate, hate Donald Trump with a passion, and can see no good in anything he does. But there are too many on the right who defend everything, everything he does, and will never find a nano-crumb of fault in him. Indeed, they will twist themselves into preposterous partisan pretzels to swat away the slightest criticism.

Look, every president has had his share of critics, and many of their naysayers were vicious. Abraham Lincoln probably had more of them than any other. And when one of them, Salmon Chase, his secretary of the treasury, with the presidency glaring out of his eyes, talked behind Lincoln’s back and politicked his way to a sacking, Lincoln, aware of what Chase was up to, did what no one could have imagined he would: promoted the man to chief justice of the Supreme Court.

“I would rather have swallowed my buckhorn chair whole, but it was the right thing to do for the country,” Lincoln told Chase’s friend, John Alley. “To have done otherwise I should have been recreant to my convictions of duty to the Republican Party and to the country. As to his talk about me, I do not mind that. Chase is, on the whole, a pretty good fellow and a very able man. His only trouble is that he has ‘The White House fever’ a little too bad, but I hope this may cure him and that he will be satisfied.”

Personally, I find the man or woman who never criticizes the nation’s leaders to be harmful, as that can lead an administration to massively overreach.

So when I criticize, say, a war I don’t want, a thin-skinned president who sics the office of the Attorney General on his detractors, as if the AG were his personal lawyer, or his recent declaration that nurses are no longer to be considered as professionals and so in their student days must be disqualified from receiving higher-end loans they need to complete their training when the nation is dealing with an acute shortage of nurses … I am exercising my rights as an American citizen to say, “Hey, something stinks here, and there’s the guy who’s causing the stink.” I have a right, even a duty to speak up.

I think Mr. Trump should consider Lincoln’s method of handling criticism.

“If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good, then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference,” Lincoln said.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.