Exactly. This has always been his method. Bet big, claim the occasional win, and with the losses, cover them up with shady dealings, or in recent years, by ignoring them.
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I think it’s his Hail Mary pass. He heard (from Rudy?) that it cured CoVID-19, snatched up a shit-ton of it, and he desperately wants it to work so he can come out a hero in this situation.
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Makes me wonder how money Trump has invested in the manufacturer.
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To be fair, hydroxychloroquine isn’t unproven. It’s been proven to kill people at high doses…
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Up to 29 million then. That’s… not good…
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Hydroxychloroquine is an old drug, and there’s no single manufacturer or patent-holder.
I’m pretty sure that this is not about Trump trying to grift, but rather about him wishing there’s a miracle cure, and convincing himself that this is it.
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“It didn’t work. People said it would work, so we tried it, but it didn’t work. But it bought some time, and now we have more masks and more tests and everything is going to be great. People are saying that anyday now this will be over, and that only 300,000 dead is a great score when it could have been worse. It could have been so much worse. But those 29 million pills I bought for you - 29 MILLION pills, think of it. It’s incredible. I just said ‘buy them, we need them. There’s no time to waste’ - they bought us some time, so I think it’s important to remember that.”
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Someone suggested that Trump keeps harping on about hydroxychloroquine so much because he finally figured out how to say the word. Which I think is true, but it’s also the drug that got latched onto (despite the evidence) by the right as a “cure” (which, even according to the best-case interpretation of wobbly evidence, it is not). Trump desperately needs there to be a magical “cure” because he both wants this whole problem to not exist, and he wants to avoid the consequences of his inaction (and actions that are making things worse).
More immediately, he just wants it all to go away. He doesn’t know how to respond to a situation where attacking it and complaining about it does nothing, where pretending he’s solved the problem doesn’t do anything. He promised an instant, magical cure and, like every other time he’s made impossible promises, he’s an angry petulant baby when no one has fulfilled them for him. So this will have to do, even if it doesn’t work, even if it kills people (because he’s still stuck in the mindset that the appearance of something is good enough).
Every time Trump talks about a “cure,” all I see is:
Rudy does seem to be directly profiting, but Rudy’s much better at taking advantage of these situations with grifts. Trump is a hapless loser even as a conman - his successful frauds were largely run by other people, and he seems to have largely failed to have taken advantage of his current situation, except with the most absurdly penny ante grifting.
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Insert favorite “THIS” gif here.
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My sister (a doctor in SoCal) has been directed by her hospital to stop prescribing hydroxychlorquine for most of the things that it would normally be prescribed for because now all the MAGA folks are coming in with fake stories trying get a prescription, such as “Why yes, my family is about to travel to a region with an ongoing malaria outbreak. How are we planning to get there given the current travel restrictions, you ask? Well aren’t you a nosey Nelly.”
There’s a very real chance that people who need this medicine for conditions like Lupus won’t be able to get it due to all the grifters.
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Up until now all the crises of his presidency have been of his own making. He’s completely inept when it comes to a real-world problem.
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Well in his defense, he’s also been completely inept at dealing with the various crises that he created.
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I have to wonder if Trump is baffled as to why his whole notion of “leadership” (going on the attack) doesn’t work here, or if he even has that much awareness.
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Cut to possible Trump responses if his “cure” gets taken up by the masses and users’ bodies start piling up.
- People didn’t use enough to make a difference. It was their fault."
- People used too much. It was their fault."
- People used it too late. It was their fault."
- “Experts” – the best – proposed its use. It was their fault."
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You know that any apocryphal stories from here on out of the drug’s success – however dicey, unproven, or scarce – will be touted by Trump as being proof of his acumen and leadership skill, and while associated deaths will be downplayed or dismissed as hoax news.
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Don’t be surprised if it’s revealed that some Drumpf subsidiary is into the pharma licensing game.
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Well, THAT’S never happened before!
(ETA but @Papasan - it does seem to be happening, right now!)
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Yeah, and reportedly, after being heavily lobbied by drug company execs who make the stuff, Trump instructed the federal government to buy a bunch of the drug. If true, this is the one thing he’s actually done in this crisis. So he’s got a massive sunk-cost fallacy shaping his reactions as well. He started all this based on a study that was so bad it actually got withdrawn, and has doubled down on believing in it.
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Now Monday. Every damn day now. It’s like watching a 5 year old in charge of a country somehow. Can’t read what’s on the page has to add constant superlatives. Lies and exaggerations with every breath.
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