Dexamethasone Donald and the Final Curtain
The President is having a rough time. That much we can easily infer by reading both the medical and the political tea leaves that have dropped all around him in recent days. As of October 7, 2020–27 days from the Presidential Election — here’s where we stand.
It is a story in three parts:
1. Trump has, or at least had, severe Covid. We can infer that from the drugs he’s been prescribed.
For the past five days he has been on a course of Remdesivir, an antiviral medication that can interrupt viral reproduction. According to the Financial Times, the FDA “authorised the emergency use of Remdesivir for Covid-19 in May for patients with severe coronavirus who need extra oxygen or mechanical ventilation to help them breathe. In August, the FDA extended the emergency use authorisation to anyone in hospital with Covid-19, however severe their disease.”
He has also been given Regeneron’s multiple-monoclonal antibody therapy, a drug that directly kills the virus. He was given an 8-gram dose, which is very high, indicating that his viral load was significant when they got him to the hospital on Friday. This drug has not yet even been authorized for emergency use, but his doctors leaned on the regulatory agencies and the company to be able to prescribe it for compassionate use. This is the drug that, in my opinion, likely saved his life. At least for now. Note, this drug does NOT stop the virus from resurging, but it can be administered again without harm, so long as his body does not develop a resistance to the antibodies, themselves.
Notably, neither of these drugs will help to reverse damage already done to the organs.
The third big-hitter drug he received was a steroid called Dexamethasone. It is used to help prevent the body’s immune system from doing more damage than the virus. When the immune system goes into overdrive, there is significant swelling that can, itself, severely damage the organs. With Covid, that swelling can be so bad that it kills the organs, then the patient. The World Health Organization advises doctors to only use the drug in severe or critical cases, because it can have powerful side-effects — both physiological and psychological.
Physiologically, it SHREDS the immune system. That is, literally, what it is intended to do, which — in this case — is good for him, because he’s getting the Remdesivir and the Regeneron cocktail to fight the Covid, but BAD for him because for the next week or so, he’s got no meaningful immune system and that bathtub mold left behind by William Howard Taft in the White House jakes might take him out quicker than he can kill anyone else with his coronavirus.
Psychologically, it can lead to mania or more severe depressive states — which has got to at least rate a bit of a worry among Trump’s advisors, right?
Well, maybe not — and that brings us to the next point.
Donnie is all alone.
2. The second thing we know, or can infer from the past few days’ events, is that President Trump is finally — and fully — leading his own parade. There really is no sane doctor in the land who, short of wanting to fluff the Commander-in-Chief, would have authorized either his Sunday night joyride, or even his discharge from the hospital as if he’d just come down with a touch of 24-Hour Covid.
But, well, Trump. Even casual observers quickly learn that he does not tolerate independence in his advisors. They either show a willingness to bend to his will, or they are drummed out of service. As such, when he needs someone to finally stand up to him, even for his own good, they are long, long gone. Some folks are lamenting Dr. Sean Conley for tarnishing his reputation this past week, but in truth, you could have inferred that from the simple fact that he’s Trump’s personal physician. It’s the same for everyone. Persistent exposure to his toxicity either leads to outright rejection, or total corruption and collapse. At this point in his life and his Presidency, there simply are no grown-ups left in the room.
That goes for his political team, too. But with them, it’s even worse: Not only have the ones with actual backbone long since been ejected from the West Wing, the toadies that are left are now all down for the count because of this virus. Here’s a list of his people who are currently either ill or in quarantine:
Hope Hicks, chief adviser to the president.
Bill Stepien, campaign manager.
Kayleigh McEnany, White House press secretary.
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
Chris Christie, top political advisor.
Melania Trump, his wife.
Nicholas Luna, assistant and “body man” to the president.
Kellyanne Conway, former White House senior adviser.
Stephen Miller, his pet Nazi.
Lord knows what sort of protocols are in place in the East Wing of the White House, right now, but given the pacing and the lunacy of the Tweets, there’s just no one there to stop him. He is amped up on steroids, likely a bit delirious, and clearly surprised — and offended — that his “triumphant return” was mocked by everyone outside of his Proud Boy Fan Club as a weird, pathetic Evita routine wherein he was clearly gasping for air. He’s pissed off, alone, and facing the greatest humiliation of his life in 28 days. CNN today has Biden up by 16 points — 57% to 41%. That is getting into Ronald Reagan / Walter Mondale ’84 territory, when the Gipper beat the Man from Minnesota by an Electoral College margin of 525 to 13.
Clearly, Donald is losing his mind — likely due to the drugs, but also because he is all alone, scared out of his wits, and can’t seem to do a damn thing about it. There is no one left to bully.
So, what does he do?
He lashes out like a haunted madman at the nation he purportedly leads.
3. In his almost four years at the helm, he has typed nearly every single type of public obscenity into his iPhone that a Manson Family member could imagine — but he saved the most purely foolish of them for today. A few hours after the Fed Chair — you know, the guy in charge of global capitalism — came right out and said, in essence, “Hey, Washington, we need massive government spending NOW to save the economy!” Trump tweeted, literally and explicitly, “I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill.”
Holy shit!
The Fed Chair screamed: “STEP ON THE GAS!” and Trump, instead, slammed on the brakes. The market reacted by cratering nearly 600 points. They will pause for a moment, before again jumping off the cliff tomorrow, when no course correction is offered. This is very, very bad.
Backed into a corner, and with the economy teetering over the abyss, he has decided to take the entire country hostage — with an implicit promise that we either elect HIM, or he will let the entire country burn.
You know, I like to think that if McDaniel, or Stepien, or McEnany, or Hicks, or even Conway were there, they might have at least tried to talk him down from such an utterly insane position — one from which he has ZERO room to retreat without looking like a fool — but maybe not. Maybe after the Covid and the Roids and the Evita jokes, he would have gone ahead and set the world on fire regardless of what any advisor suggested.
Now we’ll never know. That die has been cast. And with it, I believe, his Presidency is all but over — short of straight-up election theft, or an auto coup d’etat.
Both, sadly, are still possibilities.
But shy of that, this President has demonstrated to everyone in the past few days that he has come undone. He is unbalanced, unhinged, disconnected from reality, physically ill, and getting his ass kicked by a dude he calls Sleepy Joe.
To put it lightly: It’s not a good look.
On top of that, his idiot son Eric — a used piece of moral toilet paper, who got busted two years ago for stealing money from a children’s cancer charity — just got deposed in a court case that will almost certainly spit out a basket of Trump Family indictments before Christmas this year, and Vladimir Putin — his patron (and banker) in Moscow is either prepping the piss tape for TMZ once his gimp is no longer useful, or burning the evidence trail so none of this can ever be tied, definitively, back to him.
All in all, Trump should count himself lucky if that Taft fungus rises up from the drain pipe and puts him out of his misery. Nothing good happens for him from here. He can still drag us all down with him, but he won’t get back up off this mat.
Or so, at least, it seems.
Love to you all.
