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So, what's up with Trump's bizarre fascination with these drugs, which outstrips all scientific evidence that they are effective? Many are speculating a potential financial interest, which I wouldn't rule out this longtime grifter. But what else? (1/n) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/politics/trump-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus.html
Chroniclers of the far right in America have consistently noted that it has always been bound up with affinity scams, snake-oil sales, pyramid schemes, and other forms of crude grift: (2/n) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/08/how-scam-that-angered-trump-reveals-right-wings-inner-workings/
Some conservative commentators, such as Jonah Goldberg, have noted this critically themselves: (3/n) https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/right-wing-scam-machine-jonah-goldberg/
With stuff like Trump's fixation on hydroxychloroquine, a deeper element potentially comes into play: a propensity for magical thinking. @ProfEricOliver + @thomasjwood provide an interesting pol-psych treatment of this in 'Enchanted America': (4/n) https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo28752049.html
As Oliver & Wood note, magical/intuitive thinking predicts all kinds of things we see in evidence in Trump's politics: nationalism & authoritarianism, conspiratorial thinking, and a disregard for scientific reasoning and expertise in favor of gut feelings. (5/n)
We've seen this magical/intuitive style in Trump for a long time: (6/n) https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/27/politics/washington-post-trump-gut/index.html
So, what we are probably seeing here is a mutually-reinforcing intersection between Trump's enduring traits (whose expression is disinhibited by power, no less) and a niche political culture that has co-evolved with a range of scams. (7/7)
