The sorcerer’s apprentice prescribes poison but doles out no empathy
Just when you thought things could not get more surreal in a country of empty streets and a president with a head full of nonsense, Donald Trump goes on national TV and makes a series of colossally stupid and stunningly ignorant suggestions about possible treatments for COVID-19.
If household disinfectants kill the virus on surfaces quickly, the president asks, looking at his main public health advisor, Dr. Deborah Birx, why not inject it into COVID patients and use it to clean their lungs and other infected organs.
It speaks volumes that, while people were shocked at this hallucinatory presidential pronouncement, coming from Trump few were surprised. As if that lunacy did not suffice for one day, he went on to wonder about using ultraviolet light inside patients to wipe out the virus.
Birx, as usual, did not stand up and speak up forcefully against such madcap ideas. When prompted by Trump, she said she had never heard of using these kinds of things as a treatment. She neglected to say that injecting disinfectants would be suicidal, leaving to the makers of products like Lysol to issue a public warning. Two days later, she criticized the media for continuing to dwell on Trump’s disinfectant comments after the fact.
Trump’s crazy ideas about possible treatments for COVID-19 are not just a two-day story. They are for the ages. After that, you can add one more to the myriad derisory descriptions that fit Donald Trump like a glove, like class warrior for the rich, xenophobe supreme, racist in chief, serial liar, maximally narcissistic and minimally emphatic. Sorcerer’s apprentice.
At some level, Trump seems to believe he is a real genius and as such he can concoct a treatment for a deadly virus off the top of his head while the collective enterprise called science, in which people know what they are talking about, have yet to succeed. This is one of Donald Trump’s most dangerous delusions, acting as if he knew everything when he is the archetype of the know-nothing.
Does Trump really believe in what he says? In his book ‘The New Age,’ the science writer Martin Gardner makes a distinction between two main types among the tribe of people who claim unique insight, the seers, mystics, astrologers, numerologists, spiritualists, and the rest. One type, the crank believes in the drivel she or he spouts. The charlatan, on the other hand, does not believe in what he or she professes; these people are con artists, in it for the money and the fame. Which of the two is Donald Trump? He blurs and straddles the line.
Trump is both a crank and a charlatan. He really is a racist and xenophobe, thus he is a crank who believes racial theories that were debunked a century ago. But Trump is also a charlatan. He has known for a long time that there is in this country an untapped market for raw racism and xenophobia. Unlike Stephen Miller, his zealous point man on immigration, Trump’s main concerns in life are not racism and xenophobia. They are self-aggrandizement, sexual predation, and money. But, being a racist himself, he understands intuitively that he is in the perfect position to exploit the undying racist streak in American culture. His racism comes through to other racists as sincere because it is sincere; his denials of racism also ring true to the members of his fan club because they also deny their own racism. Trump and his mad hatters, or his MAGA hatters, dismiss criticism of their racism as “political correctness.”
Racism and xenophobia function as a con to the extent that Trump sells his voters on the idea that the thing that will do the most to solve all their problems and the country’s is keeping out immigrants and pushing blacks back down. The policies built on such beliefs are often in direct contradiction with the economic interests of a good part of Trump’s base. But using race as a way of pitting those at the bottom and in the middle against each other to the benefit of those on top is the long con par excellence in this country’s history. Trump is good at putting over this con because, although he uses an exaggerated rabid racist rhetoric to motivate his base, for him that is not a stretch.
So here we are, with almost 60,000 Americans dead of a virus that Trump initially dismissed as a hoax, or no worse than a common flu that would go down from fifteen cases to zero in a flash by a miracle. Now he wants to move to business as usual as fast as possible regardless of the cost in human lives. He is going as far as forcing meat-packing plants with horrendous infection rates to stay open. Having refused to invoke the Defense Production Act to force companies to produce life-saving masks and ventilators, he is now invoking it to make companies risk the lives of their workers and exempting the corporations from all liability resulting for the consequences.
What does it matter? Most meat-packing plant workers are minorities or white working class. Trump’s base wants their beef and pork. Agribusiness wants a continuing stream of profit. For Trump, the choice is a no-brainer.
The truth is that Trump postures as a superhero but is really the monster in this horror movie. On April 26 in the Washington Post, Philip Bump and Ashley Parker clinched the indictment against Trump for his moral depravity when they dissected the tone and tenor of his appearances at the Coronavirus Task Force press conferences. The article was published under the headline “13 hours of Trump: The president fills briefings with attacks and boasts, but little empathy.”
The nub of their piece could be the closing argument in proving Donald Trump is as morally depraved as any inhuman movie monster:
“President Trump strode to the lectern in the White House briefing room Thursday and, for just over an hour, attacked his rivals, dismissing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as a “sleepy guy in a basement of a house” and lambasting the media as ‘fake news and ‘lamestream.’
“He showered praise on himself and his team, repeatedly touting the ‘great job’ they were doing as he spoke of the ‘tremendous progress’ being made toward a vaccine and how ‘phenomenally’ the nation was faring in terms of mortality.
“What he did not do was offer any sympathy for the 2,081 Americans who were reported dead from the coronavirus on that day alone — among the now more than 54,000 Americans who have perished since the pandemic began.”
