It’s depressing to watch Trump transparently set up chloroquine as his winning move for November. It’s a free option for him in a way it isn’t for anyone else. Near-perfect textbook heads I win tails you lose. All the risk is on the doctors figuring out how to use it safely.

Speculative execution is also free for him. Bill Gates has to spend billions to speculatively execute on 7 vaccine lines. He just has to spend tax dollars to stockpile one cheap drug and people will forget masks and ventilators failures. He just needs to claim 1 piece of success

He keeps relentlessly focusing attention on his banning China flights to anchor his claim that his first response was a roaring success instead of an epic bungling. Expect a similar “I won big with chloroquine when others doubted” relentless narrative in November.

If there are elections in November at all, now in doubt, chloroquine will be The Wall. About 98% of any success will be attributed to it. PPE and distancing and frontline battles will be forgotten in his version of story. Story will be “I banned China and gave you chloroquine”

It is spiritually exhausting to watch him suck petty sustenance for himself regardless of costs to others.

It’s the opposite of the sense of nourishment you might get by looking at a great piece of art or an exceptional music performance.

Media falling right into his trap too. Dumbasses at NYT now hating on chloroquine (“unproven” is practically as insult in a headline, not a disinterested scientific qualifier) simply because he’s backing that horse. No, you ignore his backing and report on clinical trials.

He’s adding almost nothing of substance to the chloroquine subplot. He’s mainly writing himself into that story as a hero and they’re falling for it. Notice how he’s distancing himself from the tougher procurement challenges like PPE. Those failures will be for states to own.

And all this for what? Re-election redemption.

Courageous option which he can’t even see: work the actual hardest problems, not the easiest election win options. Get out of the way of people who know what they’re doing.

Not impossible. A few leaders seem to be doing that.

The amount of spiritual energy that will be needed to repair the soul-suckage this mega-pest will have inflicted by 2024 is hard to estimate. People have simply gotten used to the emotional labor load he inflicts on the world. Like a metastasized Darth Clippy in MS-Office.

I suspect his legacy will be collective amnesia. His base will form a cult after he exits. The rest of us won’t bother litigating the history of his misrule. We’ll just try to forget it and move on. The story of 2016-24 will be for historians a generation removed to write.

If you’re a person of substance yourself, you might honestly wonder what this rant is about and think “trump derangement syndrome”. You might (correctly) argue that a better human being in White House right now would not necessarily have meant a better outcome. Maybe even worse.

Complex systems problems evolve in messy, nearly ungovernable ways. It’s rarely possible to ever sort out the story of how things happened and come to a blame/credit consensus. We’ll be arguing about this history and it’s counterfactuals for decades and still get nowhere.

But whether this is a growth experience or a lifelong trauma for people in it depends on how you will answer the question the brits Queen cleverly posed: “I hope in the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge."

Cunning old lady.

The cost of Trump in this situation is that far fewer people will be acting in ways that they can take pride in, and grow from. He is reliably the worst person he can be in everything he does, and brings out the same in others in proportion to the attention they pay to him.

And sadly you can no longer tune him out easily, since every press briefing has a chance of producing actual important information, you have to endure a daily Trump rally bullshit circus to get it, from Fauci or one of the other people of substance he’s jealously BIRGing off