By now you’ve read that Trump’s medical, no, make that his reelection miracle hydroxychloroquine (a word it took him some time to learn how to pronounce) is yet another topic subject to more gaslighting coming from Trump and Fox News. They are doing their own version of “ops” we never really believed this.
From the Daily Beast “Trump Dodges on Hydroxychloroquine After Study Raises Red Flags “:
President Trump was grilled Tuesday about his flogging of an anti-malaria drug as a coronavirus treatment after a government-funded study showed it didn’t help veterans and was associated with more deaths.
He dodged.
“I don’t know of the report,” he said at the daily briefing by the coronavirus task force. “Obviously there have been some very good reports and perhaps this one’s not a good report—but we’ll be looking at it.”
… and from CNN Business: Fox News falls out of love with hydroxychloroquine:
Numbers from Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog group, give a better idea of just how obsessed Fox was with the drug. From March 23 to April 6, Fox News personalities and guests mentioned hydroxychloroquine nearly 300 times. But that's changed in recent days. Media Matters found that between April 16 to April 20 mentions of the drug dropped 77% compared to the previous five-day period.
Back on April 6th Eugene Robinson wrote in a Washington Post OpEd that “The one word that explains why Trump should not be president” was hydroxychloroquine.
That one word illustrates Trump’s arbitrary, anecdote-based method of making decisions; his reliance on cronies who have no relevant expertise; his rejection of science, or perhaps his failure to understand how science even works; his defiant stubbornness in clinging to what he “knows,” even when he doesn’t actually know it; his obsessiveness even in the face of contrary evidence; and his imperviousness to fact-based arguments he does not want to hear.
With more and more Trump supporters considering Dr. Fauci more credible than the president (who wouldn’t let him answer a question about hydroxychloroquine in a recent briefing they are noting that, as the Daily Beast put it “Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force Increasingly Ignores Trump.”
They see him giving Trump the fisheye.
Fox News is also broadcasting Gov. Cuomo’s briefings:
There is no method in the madness in Trump’s understanding of science. Trump’s method, if it could be called that, is magical thinking, which is a more extreme version of wishful thinking. It can be an indication of mental illness:
Magical thinking is the belief that one's ideas, thoughts, wishes, or actions can influence the course of events in the physical world. It is something people all over the globe engage in, and many religious and folk rituals center around it. Reference: Magical Thinking Benefits and Concerns — While sometimes helpful, it can also be a sign of mental illness
Trump is the kid who is transfixed by the shiny object which happens to be a mirror which reflects back a glorified image of himself.
The pesky thing for Trump and his legion of supporters in the media is that there is method in science.
In his story “The Moron Who Would Be Kind: Donald Trump’s Impenetrable Ignorance” Mark C. Eades wrote:
Such impenetrable ignorance: A solid steel shell of ignorance that Donald Trump wears on his head like a space helmet; and that facts, knowledge, and reason simply bounce off of like tiny meteoroids, to protect his even tinier brain from anything that he doesn’t want to know about.
This prompted me to adapt this DonkeyHotey caricature:
It is this aptly described ignorance that could very well doom Trump’s chances for reelection. That, of course, and the decidedly inconvenient fact (for Trump) that this is a non-partisan virus which may very well infect more of his risk taking supporters who defy CDC guidelines and congregate without masks or social distancing than Democrats.
In conclusion here’s another “no words are needed” illustration:
UPDATE:
Scientists’ world of truth and knowledge couldn’t be further from Trump’s, WASHINGTON POST Michael Gerson OPED
Medicine has a moral clarity that makes politics look ever muddier in comparison. Consider the contrast at the daily White House briefing. On those rare occasions when the scientists are given center stage, they impart useful knowledge and present their best judgments. Their goal — seeking public health — is unconflicted. They are precise, forthright, solid and reliable.
President Trump’s goal — on the days that one is discernible — is the maintenance of power. His method is to claim personal credit for anything that goes right, to blame others for anything that goes wrong, and to complain, and complain, and complain about his shockingly bad treatment at the hands of the media, his political enemies and the “deep state.” He does not argue for his view of events. He pounds his points with the oral equivalent of all-caps. And he assumes (on good evidence) that anyone who shares his side in the culture war will embrace his delusional, self-serving depiction of reality. Or that people will at least conclude that no one’s version of reality can really be trusted.
Trump unfiltered is like a badly polluted canal. The scraps of narcissism, the rotten remnants of conspiracy theories, the offal of sour grievance, the half-eaten bits of resentment flow by. They do not cohere. But they move in the same, insistent current of self, self, self.
Poll: Ideally you ought to read this story which summaries a Washington Post OpEd: The media is making a big mistake about Trump’s chances in 2020. If you don’t this is the conclusion of the author, Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University.
Drezner noted that even given the dismal conditions Trump is facing for his re-election, victory isn’t impossible. It’s just much harder for him to pull off than most observers in the press seem to think.
“Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 has caused political analysts to focus on the ways he can survive this debacle. And there is a chance that he can,” Drezner writes. “In the past century, only three presidents have run for reelection and lost. But the fact remains that Trump lost the popular vote and barely eked out an electoral college victory in 2016. November’s election will be a referendum on his presidency, and the country will be worse off in every possible way compared with four years ago.