Disinfectant Donnie

Do you know what the real ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ is? No, not the fauxtraged shrieks of liberals at everything the president does. It’s the tendency Trump has to turn normally sensible conservative journalists into a sort of Praetorian Guard, drawing their swords to defend his every utterance, and endowing comments that would shame a blithering idiot with non-existent purpose and meaning. The esteemed US editor of The Spectator, Mr Gray, has his gladius out. He argues the president spitballing at a press conference that perhaps one could inject disinfectant to the lungs to kill coronavirus, or irradiate the body with (carcinogenic) UV light, was actually 16-dimensional chess and ‘a Trumpian masterpiece’. The media is to blame for calling such absurdities actually dangerous. Only a moron would take Trump up on it, and therefore, the entire kerfuffle is simply elite reporters, with their fancy degrees, sneering at blue collar America that ‘Trump fans are gullible, poor, and idiotic’.The sad fact of the matter is some Trump fans fit this bill. And so do some Biden fans. There is no entrance examination, no IQ test, required to enter the ballot box. People come in all shapes and sizes, including in terms of mental agility. America is a pretty big country, with a largely quarantined population. Plenty who might not normally care for politics, or watch the news, are glued to Trump’s daily conferences. He reminds us of this on Twitter regularly. President Trump has compared his COVID-19 ratings to ‘The Bachelor finale’ five separate times, and thrice used the phrase ‘through the roof’ about them. The panicked reaction to Trump’s suggestion of injecting disinfectant, with warnings coming from his own Surgeon General and various states, as well as the media, was because people are indeed in danger. Maryland’s emergency hotline, for example, received over one hundred calls asking about ingesting disinfectants before putting out a warning. The last time Trump touted a snake-oil cure, the malaria drug chloroquine, a trusting Trump fan took the fish tank cleaner chloroquine phosphate at home, and he died. His devastated widow also took it, and was hospitalized. Were these people ‘gullible, poor and idiotic’ for trusting the president? Perhaps they are not regular readers of the Washington Post, the New York Times or The Spectator; but were they not entitled to assume the Commander-in-Chief would not recommend a drug, on national TV, without doing his research? We need to get back to the days when ‘no, I don’t take responsibility at all’ is not a presidential mantra. Trump needs to understand that his beloved ratings represent individual people, many of whom put their faith in him. Even the White House agrees that ‘Disinfectant Donnie’ was not ‘a Trumpian masterpiece’. They are downscaling the daily press conference, including Trump’s constant presence at it, starting next week.