Take it from a cattleman: That drug Trump
took would make anybody feel ten feet tall
Back when I raised cattle, it was axiomatic that you never let a
sick cow die without trying dexamethasone.
By Gene
Lyons Oct 7, 2020, 3:50pm CDT
Only Boss Trump could turn even the COVID-19 plague into a
farce.
His triumphal return to the White House from Walter Reed
National Military Medical Center — nicely timed for the evening TV news cycle —
was like a stunt his pal Kim Jong Un would pull in Pyongyang: pure strongman
street theater.
The big man stood glassy-eyed but indomitable on a balcony:
shoulder pads and a half-pound of orange stage makeup accentuating his extreme
virility. All the scene lacked was a laugh track, although in the kinds of
dictatorships Trump most admires, it is forbidden to smile.
Big, strong me, puny little you. That was the message.
It was four years almost to the day since Trump mimicked Hillary
Clinton stumbling at a campaign appearance after being diagnosed with
pneumonia. “She’s supposed to fight all these different things, and she can’t
make it 15 feet to her car,” he sneered.
So after they carried him to the hospital in a helicopter, the
White House sent out a photo of Trump supposedly hard at work. “Nothing can
stop him from working for the American people,” daughter Ivanka tweeted.
“RELENTLESS!” Alas, a closeup showed Trump relentlessly signing what appeared
to be a blank sheet of paper.
They do these things better in North Korea.
Back when I raised cattle, it was axiomatic: Never let a sick
cow die without trying dexamethasone, the powerful steroid that persuaded Trump
he was 10 feet tall and bulletproof. I’ve seen it bring animals too weak to
stand back to their feet, although not for long, unless the underlying
infection had been suppressed. It’s a stimulant, not a cure.
In humans, dexamethasone also has psychiatric side effects. (In
cows, you can’t tell. Possibly Layla the abandoned twin calf imagined herself
tyrant queen of the herd before disease carried her away. It’s impossible to
know.) The most common problems in human subjects are irritability,
aggression and what the drug label calls “psychotic manifestations.”
And wouldn’t that be wonderful?
That’s just one of the reasons nobody but Trump would have been
released from the hospital before his treatment regimen was finished. If he
weren’t going to a fully equipped White House medical clinic, that phalanx of
white-jacketed physicians who staged press conferences outside Walter Reed would
have been flirting with malpractice to let him check out.
An NPR reporter noticed that all of Dr. Sean Conley’s written
press releases were preceded by a disclaimer saying, in effect, “Donald J.
Trump has approved this message.”
People saw right through it, too. A CNN poll found that “69% of
Americans said they trusted little of what they heard from the White House
about the president’s health, with only 12% saying they trusted almost all of
it.”
Besides, he wasn’t really going “home,” merely to a smaller
hospital where he can be monitored and treated.
What’s more, Trump’s euphoria was not only chemically induced,
but it’s also unlikely to last. Repeated doses of dexamethasone can be quite
dangerous. It’s administered only in serious circumstances, signifying to
physicians who don’t work for the White House that Trump was a whole lot sicker
when he went to Walter Reed than anybody wanted to let on.
Then where was the hydroxychloroquine, inquiring minds want to know?
So yes, there’s every chance that even Boss Trump, the political
superhero with “the body that men fear and women adore” (in the words of 1950s
professional wrestling champ Dr. Jerry Graham, who was bashing rivals with
balsa wood chairs at Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, back when Trump was
an impressionable lad), will get sicker before he gets better.
(Graham also carried a formidable swag belly, and pretty much
invented the elaborate blond pompadour wrestling villains featured back then.
Trump basically stole his whole act.)
But I digress. The point is that anybody tempted to heed Boss
Trump’s advice — “Don’t be afraid of COVID. Don’t let it dominate your life” —
would be well-advised to wait a few weeks before venturing maskless to one of
his campaign rallies. We don’t know, in Conley’s words, that he’s out of the
woods yet. But we do know that he’s actively contagious.
We also know that Trump cares not at all which Secret Service
agents and White House flunkies get infected. Not to mention those anonymous
hordes in their MAGA hats and T-shirts.
Meanwhile, Trump acolyte Rudy Giuliani, himself memorably
described by Jimmy Breslin as “a small man in search of a balcony,” went on Fox
News to mock Joe Biden for wearing a face mask. Not manly, he said between
bouts of heavy coughing. Fox Newsblonde Martha MacCallum said she hoped “that
cough is not anything bad.”
So have I no humane feelings for Boss Trump, his attendant courtiers
and poltroons? I’d answer that I have exactly the same degree of empathy and
concern he’d have for me and my loved ones.
I leave it to readers to decide what that might be.