How Trump is an Idiot

Count some of the endless ways that Donald Trump is an idiot.

1. He thinks that injecting, ingesting, imbibing, or otherwise instilling disinfectants into the body to give it (especially the lungs) a good "cleaning" is a promising idea.

2. He thinks that riffing, on live national television, on treatment ideas that flit into his head in the moment, and running them by his medical advisers while millions watch, is an appropriate thing to do.

3. He thinks it plausible that he could come up with potential treatment ideas that medical experts somehow never thought of.

4. And he thinks it plausible because, although Trump admits he is "not a doctor," he's "like a person who has a good you-know-what." He said that while twirling his finger in the vicinity of his head. No, Don, you don't. Your you-know-what has a lot of screws loose. Your noodle is noxious. You noggin is nutty.

5. He thinks he should encourage his top medical experts to "look into" his wacky ideas, because they seemingly have nothing better to do during a pandemic in which 50,000 Americans have so far died.

6. And so forth.

"In Maryland," the New York Times reported, "so many callers flooded a health hotline with questions that the state’s Emergency Management Agency had to issue a warning that 'under no circumstances' should any disinfectant be taken to treat the coronavirus. In Washington State, officials urged people not to consume laundry detergent capsules. Across the country on Friday, health professionals sounded the alarm."

"Even the makers of Clorox and Lysol pleaded with Americans not to inject or ingest their products," the Times added

From the Times: "Injecting bleach or highly concentrated rubbing alcohol 'causes massive organ damage and the blood cells in the body to basically burst,'  Dr. Diane P. Calello, the medical director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, said in an interview. 'It can definitely be a fatal event.'"

"The frantic reaction was prompted by President Trump’s suggestion on Thursday that an 'injection inside' the human body with a disinfectant like bleach or isopropyl alcohol could help combat the virus," said the Times.

Trump was apparently enthralled with a presentation he had just witnessed on how long it takes certain disinfectants to kill the coronavirus: five minutes for bleach, thirty seconds for isopropyl alcohol. Naturally Trump thought we might be overlooking a nifty way to clean things up in the body in no time at all.

"I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute," Trump said during Thursday’s coronavirus press briefing. (The transcription is mine.)  "And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that." Trump was talking to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House's top coronavirus task force health expert, who was off camera.

To be clear, the notion of instilling nebulized medicines into the airway and lungs is not crazy. That is done in what's commonly called a "breathing treatment." Bronchodilators and steriods are sometimes given in exactly that manner.

And it would not be crazy for a curious layman to inquire of an expert why an antimicrobial substance can't be introduced into the lungs to combat active infection. That intuition is not absurd even if there are simple reasons, opaque to the layman, that it would not work.

What's crazy is dangerous, stream-of-consciousness musing about using common surface disinfectants to give one's insides a good cleaning. The point is there is a right way and a wrong way, a right place and a wrong place, to ask such questions. A live briefing watched by millions, where remarks should be measured, circumscribed, clarifying, and guiding is the wrong way and place. We expect a minimally competent president to understand such things. Indeed, we expect a minimally competent president to mostly stay in the background and let the medical authorities do most of the talking. This one insists on running the show, and turning it into a spectacle.

And further, it's a  pretty good bet that a buffoonish president isn't going to hit on a treatment that was overlooked by respiratory infection experts. We do not need the U.S. president attempting to connect the treatment dots for the medical establishment.

Trump also thought it might be useful to employ a strong ultraviolet light against the virus, and even to somehow get the light inside the body. Uh, no. If the virus were on you skin you might be able to kill it by giving yourself a really good sunburn. Or, you could take a shower. Getting a UV light inside the body bonkers.

A prominent Republican senator told the Times that Trump's nightly briefings "were so painful he could not bear watching any longer." Having seen too many of them myself, I'll second that.

All this comes after Trump's weeks-long touting of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, despite his own expert advisers' constant refusal to go along, and their obvious discomfort with his irresponsible hype. The drug has not been shown to be safe or effective, they have consistently warned. Reports of its usefulness have been anecdotal. But Trump, ever the layman, and desperate for a magic bullet, never understood why that matters.

Now recent studies and reports from the field indicate that it may be neither safe nor effective. In one controlled study (not yet peer reviewed) involving 368 patients at a V.A. hospital, more patients who took the drug died than those who didn't. The FDA recently warned that the drug comes with a variety of serious cardiac arrhythmia risks, and should only be used in a hospital setting under careful supervision. That warning came with word that because of the president's irresponsible promotion, the drug was being prescribed to all kinds of people who had no business taking it. Prescriptions went through the roof after the president began hyping it.

But Trump, who wanted everybody on the drug, knew better. "What do you have to lose?" he asked over and over. Maybe a lot. Why-oh-why can't he just let his medical experts make those calls? What's intolerable is that a president, especially one who is such a simpleton, would insert himself into this matter at all, while rejecting the guidance of his medical advisors.

Columnist Frank Bruni writes that "Trump is self-destructing before our eyes." But a lot of us argued he has been self-destructing for a very long time, and so far it hasn't changed his appeal to his base. Idiocy has thus far not been a disqualification. I personally know persons for whom it hasn't. Can this time really be different? I have my doubts.

And doesn't that say something profoundly depressing about the state of our country?

Copyright (C) 2020 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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