Injecting Lysol: Trump’s scientific ignorance
President Trump “has often said he is exceptionally smart,” said Matt Flegenheimer in The New York Times, citing his genetic connection to a supposedly “super-genius” uncle who’s a scientist. But his musings last week on alternative treatments for Covid-19 did not make Trump sound very smart; in fact, they created “near-universal public alarm.” At one of his painful-to-watch coronavirus briefings, an excited Trump hailed research showing the coronavirus’ vulnerability to sunlight and household disinfectant. To the visible discomfort of coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump wondered what would happen if “you brought the light inside the body...either through the skin or in some other way,” and if disinfectant could be used to clear Covid-riddled lungs “by injection inside, or almost a cleaning.” Of all the “head-snappingly stupid things” Trump has said, this stands apart, said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. Yes, it follows weeks of him touting hydroxychloroquine “like he was on an infomercial hawking ‘male enhancement’ pills,” and months of him insisting the virus would just go away “like a miracle.” But the sheer madness of his bleach cure illustrates “with particular vividness not just who he is, but the damage he’s doing to the country.”
It was admittedly “foolish” of Trump to “spitball” about possible treatments in public, said Andrew McCarthy in NationalReview .com. But it’s not true, as the media contended, that the president was “recklessly encouraging Americans to experiment on themselves” by ingesting or injecting Lysol or bleach. What he actually said is that his advisers and “medical doctors” would need to “test” whether these treatments would work. Trump was “not remotely suggesting that this was something the public should act on.” Trump’s “dumb musings” on treatments for Covid-19 prove two things, said Eddie Scarry in WashingtonExaminer .com. One is that “the national media delight in deliberately misstating” whatever Trump says to make him look like an idiot. The other is that Trump should bring “the daily press briefings to a full stop.”
Bleachgate didn’t happen in a vacuum, said Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer in The New York Times. The subordination of science to his own instincts and whims has been “a defining characteristic of Trump’s administration.” Even before being elected, he hyped the nonexistent link between vaccines and autism, and dismissed climate change as a “hoax” cooked up by the Chinese—a view that led him to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. Trump’s “disquieting war on science” is a fundamental part of his brand, said Ariel Dorfman in TheGuardian.com. His populist political movement has “anti-intellectual DNA,” just like every other “strongman” movement in modern history.
Trump actually believes he’s smarter than scientists, said Jonah Goldberg in TheDispatch.com. Longing for an “easy fix” to a pandemic that threatens his re-election, Trump seized on the bleachand-sunlight cure as “a brilliant idea that never occurred to the fancy-pants experts.” Trump suffers from what is known as “the Dunning-Kruger effect,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. This well-documented phenomenon describes how people with low ability “are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence.” What should worry us most about Trump’s embrace of quack cures isn’t that gullible people will try them. It’s that he’s left no doubt we’re facing the greatest public-health crisis in a century behind the leadership of “an ignorant crank who thinks he’s a genius.”