None of this man’s stupidity is an act
Donald Trump says he is taking hydroxychloroquine. In a slightly more sane pandemic universe, this would be a minor headline in the entertainment section of the New York Post, but instead he’s the president of the United States and CNN is forced to hold several panel discussions in which they discuss, with escalating levels of strangely fresh-eyed disbelief, that this is happening at all.
There is no proof that the president is taking the very talked-about drug, of course, but it must be nice, to still be surprised. Three years ago, Trump said his inauguration crowds were the biggest crowds of all time, when that was a clear and provable delusion. That was day ONE.
The intervening three years have mostly been a reminder that in the 1990s Trump’s own law firm would send two lawyers to meet with him, always, because as one testified under oath, “Donald says certain things and then has a lack of memory.”
The pandemic is a mirror, and we suddenly see ourselves for what we are: a world that runs on the grind of low-paid workers while Jeff Bezos aims to become a trillionaire; a country whose government must be the most important safety net; a province that would like to send our kids to school, but also not kill anybody while doing so. Yeah, Ontario made the right call on the schools.
And it has long been clear that Trump spends his tortured, brute existence trapped in a hall of broken mirrors, unable to see anything but distorted visions of himself.
“Look,” Trump said the other day of his predecessor, Barack Obama, “he was an incompetent president, that’s all I can say. Grossly incompetent.”
“I think he’s a maniac,” Trump said last year, on the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee. “I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he’s a very sick man. And he lies.”
“You’re crooked as hell, OK, thank you very much,” he said of the media last year, and probably every year, whatever.
The pandemic provides a grimmer clarity. It is showing that Trump is exactly what he is, and always was: an unshakably dumb septuagenarian con man, completely unable to grasp even basic concepts, able only to stride through life through bulls---, yet absolutely confident that he is correct.
It’s not that he is merely a bad person. He is, of course. He is a human Twinkie, unnaturally toasted and filled to the brim with all-white racism and venal resentment. He is definitely that.
But this is different. Hydroxychloroquine is the malaria and lupus drug that showed some glimmer of promise, was hyped by Trump and conservative media, and was shown to cause potentially fatal heart arrhythmia in COVID patients in several studies without showing any real benefits. But there are real side-effects.
So the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cautioned against using it outside of a hospital or clinical setting and a National Institutes of Healthfunded study from Veterans Affairs said there were no clear benefits.
“No, that’s not what I was told,” Trump said in a short afternoon news conference. “No. That was a false study done. Where they gave it to very sick people. Extremely sick people. People that were ready to die. It was given by obviously not friends of the administration. And the study came out. The people were ready to die.
“It’s got a bad reputation just because I’m promoting it.”
Reflexive ignorance, attacking experts in his own government, turning everything into a slight on him with a black-hole narcissism so powerful it has sucked the whole world into its orbit? That’s typical Trump stuff.
He also claimed Tuesday that “the (coronavirus) numbers are coming down all over the United States very rapidly, very rapidly,” which is plainly a lie or fantasy, or maybe both.
He probably doesn’t even know which. Trump exists to blot out the very notion of objective reality, and we’ve just become numb to it.
But hydroxychloroquine cuts to the core of Trump, even if there is no proof he is actually taking the drug, other than his word. This drug doesn’t even work as a snake-oil miracle cure anymore except with the absolute rubes, and reality is coming.
Every U.S. state will have relaxed some form of stay-athome orders by the end of the week, and there are over 93,000 American dead. The only real play might be to hope the virus becomes American gun violence: preventable death accepted through political affiliation. There’s a reason Canada just extended the closed-border agreement to June 21.
No, the most likely explanation is hydroxychloroquine planted itself in Trump’s mashed potato brain, and it can’t be uprooted. His doctor might be giving him a placebo, but some things stick in there. As journalist Joshua Green reported in his book “Devil’s Bargain,” Trump’s advisers used a border wall with Mexico as a metaphorical trick to make him remember to talk about immigration in campaign speeches. Four years later, he’s still trying to get a real one built.
So the unreality isn’t new, but then you realize the difference. Before this, Trump’s lunacy and incompetence endangered other people. But he’s so dumb he can put himself at risk, too. Yes, this is the president who stared at a solar eclipse without protective glasses, who has refused to wear a mask, who ignored physical distancing even as members of the White House tested positive for the coronavirus all around him.
None of the stupidity is an act, even as political reporters still work to make him a normal president. He might be a few weeks from drinking bleach to prove a point.
But Donald Trump is just a completely stupid clever man who has yet to pay for all his sins, and so is incapable of changing at age 73. The pandemic shouldn’t have been necessary to make that crystal clear, of course. But, at last, here we are.