He just can’t suffer the thought of being wrong, can he?
Whether it’s due to a psychological problem of quite the magnitude, or a cold-blooded political calculation that his base expects him to follow through on whatever his mouth decides to say, yesterday President Trump announced that he is taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive against Covid-19:
President Donald Trump claimed Monday he is taking daily doses of hydroxychloroquine, a drug he’s long touted as a potential coronavirus cure even as medical experts and the US Food and Drug Administration question its efficacy and warn of potentially harmful side effects.
Speaking at a meeting of restaurant executives, Trump said he began taking the antimalarial drug after consulting the White House doctor, though stopped short of saying his physician had actually recommended the drug.
“A couple of weeks ago, I started taking it,” Trump said. He later said he’d been taking it every day for a week and a half. [CNN]
The obvious questions: Is he telling the truth, or did that just come flying out on its own? If he’s taking anything, are they real meds – or is he taking sugar pills? Even this: Did his source of the med give him sugar pills?
But why?
President Trump’s relationship to his base requires that he be the tough, know-it-all amateur who represents them. This is the next step in proving to them the validity of their position – by taking a medicine that he’s advocated. In this, he is tougher than, say, disgraced televangelist Jimmy Bakker, who I very much doubt has ever taken the silver solution he has, until recently, been advocating.
At first, it occurred to me that this is a big risk for the President, because if he becomes ill, his base will fracture. And that’s why I think he’s lying. There’s no way to prove it, but I think this is purely the result of a political calculation. He can’t win without his base, and so he’s done what’s necessary to settle them down and reassure them that he’s still on their side in terms of the relationship between them and the experts that the Republican Party has despised since at least the days of Gingrich.
But this is, in its essence, a story. What comes next? What if Trump comes down with a cold? Does he tell his base that’s perfectly normal with hydroxychloroquine? Does he claim he has COVID-19 and hydroxychloroquine is saving his life? His base believes him implicitly, so he can say anything that advances his cause.
This may prove very interesting.
