By David K. Shipler
Americans
have a better chance of keeping themselves and others safe by ignoring what
President Trump says. He has already contributed to the
death of an Arizona man who, along with his wife, took chloroquine
(used to clean fish tanks!) the day after Trump misinformed the country about
its anti-viral effectiveness. Medical experts criticized the Food and Drug
Administration’s emergency authorization for its use, because too much can
kill you. In fact, its use against malaria is not necessarily
applicable to COVID-19 without careful clinical trials to establish proper
dosing. In the wife’s case, it sent her into critical condition. Even doctors
who listened to Trump are writing prescriptions to hoard
the drug for themselves, depleting supplies for those who really need it for lupus
and other ailments.
This is
what the United States has come to. You can’t believe your president, the one
who is getting a 55 percent approval
rating for the way he is mishandling the pandemic. You shouldn’t
have accepted his cavalier assessment that the supposed severity of the virus
was just the Democrats’ “new
hoax” that would soon disappear.
You can’t trust his absurd assurances that sufficient tests and medical
equipment are available, or that they’re not really needed in bulk.
You certainly shouldn’t act on his
push to fill
the churches on Easter and to go back to work—advice he’s now
recanted by extending preventive guidelines until April 30. His cavalier,
contradictory, self-absorbed briefings have encouraged millions to take the
disease less seriously than warranted, which could lead to the collapse of law
enforcement, health care, fire departments, infrastructure maintenance, and
food supplies as those essential workers drop into sickness.
Trump
is a national security risk. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying
attention. He refuses to talk to governors who don’t fawn over him. He claims
to have inherited “a broken system.” Yet he has been in office for more than three
very long years, during which he has watched TV compulsively, tweeted his
grievances and insults, played lots of golf, come to work late in the morning,
and governed the way Boris Yeltsin did in Russia as it descended: by simply firing
people, as if the federal government were his TV show, The Apprentice.
