Republican Behind “Trump Derangement Bill” Accused of Soliciting Minor
Republican state Senator Justin Eichorn was arrested hours after he introduced the bill.

A right-wing Minnesota state senator, who infamously co-sponsored a bill Monday to label “Trump Derangement Syndrome” a mental illness, was arrested hours later for allegedly soliciting a minor for prostitution.
Senator Justin Eichorn was arrested at 6 p.m. Monday in Bloomington, Minnesota, and is being held in the city’s jail after sending messages to and arranging a meetup with a person who he thought was a 16-year-old girl but was actually a Bloomington Police Department detective. After the arrest was made public, his Republican colleagues in the Minnesota Senate, including Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth, called for his resignation.
“While he is entitled to due process, we must hold legislators to a higher standard,” Demuth said in a statement.
It’s quite a fall for the 40-year-old Eichorn, who is married with four children and has served in the Minnesota Senate since 2016. His day began with himself and four other Republican senators introducing the bill to declare “Trump Derangement Syndrome” a mental illness, describing it 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The bill was attacked by state Democrats, who asked that it be withdrawn. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy called it “possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history.”
“If it is meant as a joke, it is a waste of staff time and taxpayer resources that trivializes serious mental health issues,” Murphy said in a statement. “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.”
This isn’t the first bill Eichorn has sponsored that has verged on the absurd. Last year, he co-sponsored a bill inspired by the discredited “chemtrails” conspiracy theory, which included pseudoscience such as “xenobiotic electromagnetism and fields.” Now, unless he resigns, he’ll have to conduct legislative activity under the suspicion of being a child sex offender.