The Perils of a Know-It-All President

President Donald Trump is a self-described “very stable genius” with “a very, very large, uh, brain,” and he knows more than anybody about many things, but we’ll not be looking to him for medical advice. During Thursday’s press briefing he urged the government’s top experts to explore the possibility of treating COVID-19 by injecting patients with disinfectants and shoving ultraviolet lights inside their bodies.

The remarks came after William Bryan, the head of science at the Department of Homeland Security, told the assembled press corps how government research had found that sunlight and disinfectants can kill the coronavirus on surfaces in a little as 30 seconds. Clearly excited by the news, Trump took the podium to say “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but we’re going to test it? And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.” After getting a seemingly reluctant nod from Bryan, Trump went on to say “And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that injection, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

The videotape clearly shows Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, with a rather inscrutable look on her face. When she took to the podium she said, in carefully chosen words, that Trump’s suggestion was not a promising avenue of research. “Not as a treatment,” she said. “I mean, certainly fever is a good thing when you have a fever. It helps your body respond. But not as, I have not seen heat or…” At which point Trump cut her off, saying “I think that’s a great thing to look at, I mean you know, OK?”

We’re piling on the huge heap of ridicule Trump has endured partly for the fun of it, but also because Trump’s worrisome tendency toward wishful thinking and pseudo-scientific hunches have impeded his response to the coronavirus crisis. He delayed a coordinate effort to secure and family distribute medical equipment for weeks he spent assuring the public that it would all go away with the warmth of April and one day miraculously disappear, and continues to resist calls for testing on a per-capita scale that more than 20 other countries have already achieved. On a visit to the Centers for Disease Control Trump boasted that all the doctors were in awe of his scientific knowledge of virology and epidemiology, although he also admitted he’d been surprised to recently learn that the seasonal flu can be deadly, and it does not bode well that he clearly believes he knows more than anybody about almost everything.

Trump has lately abandoned his advocacy of hydroxychloroquine as the miracle cure for COVID-19, after three recent studies from three countries indicate it is not an effective treatment and can have deadly consequences, but he’s still urging his scientists to pursue time-wasting research and resisting calls for the widespread testing that might reveal some numbers Trump does not want to hear. The daily press briefings are intended to reassure a frightened American public that the nation’s best and brightest are on the job, and on a day when the national death toll surpassed 50,000 and the unemployment rate hit Great Depression levels Thursday’s performance was counter-productive.

— Bud Norman

The Smart People Know That What They Don’t Know Can Hurt Them

As a result of good fortune and our own diligent efforts, we’ve come to know quite a few highly intelligent people over our many years. Both of our parents are very smart people in very different ways, the friends they invited to the house also tended to be very smart in various ways that fascinated us as we eavesdropped on the adult conversations, and thus we learned at an early age to cultivate friendships whenever possible with very smart people.

At this point our circle of friends includes all sorts of people, some of them not so bright but endearingly good in other important ways, but also professors at prestigious universities and award-winning authors and journalists and fully-fledged partners at fancy-pants law firms and successful politicians, as well as many artists and musicians and entrepreneurs whose genius hasn’t yet been appreciated. One thing we’ve noticed about very smart people is that they don’t brag about how smart they are, and are more acutely aware than most about how much of the infinite store of possible knowledge that they don’t know.

President Donald Trump has proclaimed himself a “very stable genius,” and has claimed to know more than anybody about everything from taxes and debt to “the awesome power of nuclear” and America’s government and the Bible, and he clearly considers himself the greatest polymath to occupy the White House since at least the administration of President Thomas Jefferson. Which we find worrisome, especially with this coronavirus spreading around the world and spooking all the global stock markets as it inflicts increasing pain on the world economy.

Last week Trump donned a campaign ball cap and visited the Centers for Disease Control, where he boasted that all the doctors he’d encountered were awestruck by his deep knowledge of epidemiology in general and the coronavirus in particular. “Maybe I have a natural ability,” Trump explained, noting that he had a “great, super-genius” uncle who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s the same uncle who told his nephew that atomic bombs are very destructive, by the way, which is why Trump claims to know more than anybody about “the awesome power of nuclear.” At the same time he admitted being surprised to learn that the normal seasonal influenza is also often deadly, although that’s pretty common knowledge, and even though the flu had killed his uncle’s father and his own paternal grandfather, which the all the press already knew.

All of the very smart people we know would have let the doctors at the CDC who are clearly smarter about epidemiology in general and the coronavirus in particular do all the talking and be in charge, but Trump has his own ways of doing things. He has hunches that the coronavirus isn’t as deadly as the medical experts say, and that it will all be miraculously over come spring, and that although he’s not going to shake any hands and will keep a cruise ship full of American citizens at sea to contain the virus there’s really nothing to worry about. Unless you have complete faith in Trump’s “very stable genius,” it’s not reassuring.

At the same time, there’s all the economic fallout from what might very well prove an over-blown panic about the coronavirus. Mass public events and private vacations are being cancelled, elementary and post-graduate classes are being sent on-line, workforces are being asked to work from home, supply chains between vital countries in the global economy are being disrupted, and stock markets everywhere are tanking. Trump still touts the “best economy” ever but the federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits and the Federal Reserve Board is already damned near to zero on its interest rates, and more worrisomely the bond markets are offering a zero yield, and all the smart people we know about this stuff freely admit they don’t know what to do in case of a possible recession, as deficit spending and lower interest rates and newly-printed money are the usual answer.

Trump might very well propose a stimulus package of deficit spending and quantitative easing of freshly-printed money to keep the economy afloat, much as President Barack Obama did during the last recession, in which case all t he Republicans and Democrats will probably all change sides. We’ll freely admit that we don’t know what to do, and will retain our usual wariness about what all the smart people admit they don’t know, and continue to hope for the best.

— Bud Norman

The Penalty for Early Withdrawal

President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of American forces in Syria in advance of an invasion of the country Turkey being widely criticized, even by such reliably sycophantic supporters as South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and televangelist Pat Robertson. The move is seen as a betrayal of America’s Kurdish allies that will make future alliances harder to forge, an appeasement of Turkey’s authoritarian government that will eventually redound to the benefit of Russia and Iran, and an opportunity for the brutal Islamic State to regroup.

Scarier yet, as far as we’re concerned, is Trump’s “tweeted” attempt to reassure the public that he knows what he’s doing.

“As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).” Trump wrote. “They must, with Europe and others, watch over the capture ISIS fights and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!”

The die-hard Trump defenders will once again insist that he was being jocular with that line about his “great and unmatched wisdom,” and it did get a lot of laughs on the late night comedy shows, but a “tweet” about national security seems an odd place for a joke. Trump told the Republican party’s convention that “Only I can fix” the nation’s problems, has boasted of his “very big brain” and repeatedly described himself as a “very stable genius,” and he’s never given a wink or any other indication that he was joking rather than bragging. His confidence in his instincts are such that he reportedly didn’t bother to consult anyone at the Pentagon or State Department about his Syrian withdrawal, which does not inspire our confidence.

One also wonders what Trump’s great and unmatched wisdom might consider “off limits” for Turkey, which is poised to invade Syria with the obvious intention of fighting the Kurds rather than the remnants of the Islamic State, and when Trump ever destroyed the Turkish economy.

The betrayal of the Kurds, along with Trump’s withdrawal from several treaties and constant badgering of longtime military and trade partners, will make it harder for self-proclaimed greatest negotiator ever will make it harder for America to enlist international support when it is inevitably needed. Giving free rein to the Turks will delight the Russian and Iranian governments, who don’t have America’s best interests at heart. The Islamic State won’t soon regain its caliphate, but without America helping the Kurds keep a foot on its throat the terror gang will be better able to launch attacks against America and whatever allies it has left.

It’s hard for us and even the likes of Graham and McConnell and Robertson to see how this is making America great again, but we don’t have Trump’s great and unmatched wisdom.

— Bud Norman