An editorial summary about Trump's irrational stupidity published in The Week:
Donald Trump "has often claimed that he is exceptionally smart," said Matt Flegenheimer, in The New York Times, citing his genetic connection to a supposedly "super-genious" uncle who is a scientist. But, his musings last week about alternativ treatments for COVID-19, did not make Trump sound very smart. Rather, they created "near-universl public alarm".
At one of his too-painful-to-watch coronavirus briefings, an excited Trump hailed reseach showing the coronairus' vulnerability to sunlight and household disinfectants. To the visible dicomformt of coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx (who should have stood up to Trump, but instead looked like the naughty lady sitting in the princibal's office) Trump wondered what would happen if "you brought the light inside th ebody...either through the skin or in some other way, " and if disinfectant could be used to clear the COVID-riddled lungs, "by injection inside, or almost a cleaning."
 |
When Donald Trump asked about injesting chemicals into the lungs to clean them out or shine heat into the body to kill the coronavirus, Dr. Deborah Birx was visibly uncomfortable. But, she sat properly, looking like the naughty lady waiting to spill the beans on a guilty student in the principals' office. She never called out Trump's stupidity! Shame on her!
|
Of all the "head-snappingly stupid things" Trump has said, this stands apart, said Paul Waldman, in The Washington Post. Yes, it follows weeks of him touting inthe hydroxycholoroquine, "like he was on an infomercial hwking 'male enhancement pills," nd months of Trum insisting that the virus would just go away, "like a miracle". But, the sheer madness of his bleach cure illustrates, "with particular vividenss not just who Trump is, but the damage he's doing to the country."
Moreover, after Trump speculated about ingesting toxic disinfectants as a treatment for coronavirus, the Kansas secretary of health reported that a man drank a cleaning product "because of the advice he received," and the state's Poison Control Center saw a 40 percent spike in cleaning-chemical exposure cases.
In fact, the makers of Lysol and Clorox had to warn customers to not ingest their products. Nonetheless, two men in Georgia drank cleaning products hoping to prevent COVID-19 infections and in Illinois, two people were reported to gargle with bleach mixted with mouthwash in attemps to killthe coronavirus. Maryland and New York also saw upticks in poison-control inqiries about cleaning products.
Trump actually believes that he's smarter than scientists, said Jonah Goldbert, in TheDispatch.com. Longing for an "easy fix" to a pandemic that threatens his re-election, Trump seized on the bleach-and-sunlight cure as a "brilliant idea that never occured to the fancy-pants experts." Trump suffers from what is known as the Dunning-Kruger* effect, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com.
This well-documented phenomenon describes how people with low ability are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. what shoud worry us most about Trump's embrace of quack cures isnt't that gullible people will try thm. It's that e's lfet no doubt that we're facing the greatest public-health crises in a century behind the leadershp of "an ignorant crank, who thinks he's a genius."
*In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.
