Donald Trump is such a narcissistic sociopath that for him no lives matter except his own and maybe his children’s. Trump himself is a life-long germaphobe who has always gone to extraordinary lengths to protect himself even from his infant son. Yet he is a total hypocrite who insists on holding indoor campaign rallies with maskless supporters packed together which have the potential to become super-spreader events.
Here is a man whose grandfather, Friedrich Trump, the founder of the Trump family dynasty, suddenly dropped dead during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. He not only hasn’t learned anything from his own family history about dealing with a pandemic, but also keeps getting the year of the pandemic wrong by referring to the 1917 flu.
And even before anyone ever heard of COVID-19, as many New Yorkers like myself knew, Trump had a reputation as a total germaphobe.
A story about Trump’s germaphobia that appeared on the Politico website on July 7, 2019, was headlined The Purell Presidency. It said that the first thing Trump often told his body man to do upon entering the presidential limousine after shaking hands at campaign events was: “Give me the stuff” — a quick squirt of Purell hand sanitizer.
The story went on to read:
“Two and a half years into his term, President Donald Trump is solidifying his standing as the most germ-conscious man to ever lead the free world. His aversion shows up in meetings at the White House, on the campaign trail and at 30,000 feet. And everyone close to Trump knows the president’s true red line.
“If you’re the perpetrator of a cough or of a sneeze or any kind of thing that makes you look sick, you get that look,” said a former Trump campaign official. “You get the scowl. You get the response of — he’ll put a hand up in a gesture of, you should be backing away from him, you should be more considerate and you should extricate yourself from the situation.
“The president’s admitted germaphobia has been a fixture throughout his career — from real-estate deal rooms to casino floors — and it’s now popping up in more public ways. It could create another round of tactile challenges as Trump launches his 2020 campaign, during which he might try to steer visitors toward his signature thumbs-up selfies and away from handshakes for the next 16 months.”
And yet this germaphobe completely botched his response to the coronavirus. The Bob Woodward tapes prove his total hypocrisy by revealing that he knew how deadly COVID-19 was, while downplaying the threat in public.
If anyone had any doubt about the Politico story just recall Trump’s reaction in 2019 when acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney started coughing in the Oval Office while the president was being interviewed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
Trump’s germaphobia goes way back. In a 1993 interview on “The Howard Stern Show,” Trump revealed that he likes to wash his hands as many times as possible during the day and needs to drink through a straw to avoid contamination.
Stern told Trump that his obsessive hand washing could be a sign of a psychological problem, and Trump replied that it could be.
"I like it. I like cleanliness. Cleanliness is a nice thing. Not only hands, body, everything," Trump told Stern.
Politico cited another Stern interview with Trump from 2007 in which he said he was even afraid of catching an illness from his 1-year-old son Barron. “When he has a cold, I just keep him away from me,” he said.
So there you have it. Let’s denounce the hypocrisy of our “Germaphobe” president who simply doesn’t care about any of you.