I just got a letter on White House stationery telling me my economic impact payment arrived. I knew that last week. The printed signature looked - appropriately - like the jagged lines on a polygraph test. It was President Donald J. Trump, who just spent millions of taxpayer dollars - how many, we’ll probably never know - to take credit for the checks, which also had his name printed on them.The tax dollars would probably have been spent on another weekend golf outing or three, but Trump is temporarily confined to the White House. The good news is the letters went out first class, which should help the US Postal Service, which Trump is trying to destroy as part of his vendetta against Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon and The Washington Post.Who benefits? Not the taxpayers, whose money he spends so freely on ego gratification, as when he flies around to his own golf resorts to play a few rounds and pocket some extra bucks by overcharging the Secret Service for rooms and golf-cart rentals. He’d also like to be jetting off to hold his raucous rallies between time on the links so he can blame the Democrats and the media for all that is wrong in the world, while crowing about his perfect leadership.He went to the CDC headquarters in Atlanta to boast of being a medical savant. It’s something he has exhibited repeatedly, declaring global warming is a hoax, wind turbines cause cancer, hydroxychloroquine would be a “phenomenal… game changer” and “tremendous” bursts of “powerful light” plus injections of disinfectants will cure COVID-19.He claims he got his “natural instinct for science” not from any formal education but his late uncle John, an MIT physics professor. There’s no evidence he inherited anything from his uncle, who left money to Donald’s cousins but not to Donald. An obituary said the professor, who died in 1985, had a “humanitarian impulse” and was “remarkably even-tempered, with kindness and consideration to all, never threatening or arrogant.” Obviously no family resemblance there.The president’s Clorox moment reminded me of Smith and Dale, the legendary Jewish vaudevillians whose signature schtick was titled “Dr. Kronkheit and his only living patient.” Kronkheit is Yiddish for sickness, and that - or worse - will be the fate of anyone following Dr. Trump’s medical advice.Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne said Trump’s talk of injections of disinfectant sealed his status as “a clear and present danger to public health.” IT TOOK TRUMP another day and a bipartisan deluge of criticism and ridicule to try to shrug off the stupidity of his remarks as “sarcasm.” That is even more unbelievable for someone known to be devoid of a sense of humor.There are conflicting stories about where Trump learned of his miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine. One reputed source is Rudy Giuliani, who played a key role in getting Trump impeached with his bogus Ukraine investigations. He said he learned about it from Ukrainian-born Dr. Vladimir Zelenko. The former mayor is lately trying to portray himself as a science adviser, not just another political hitman.Trump personally “has a small personal financial interest” in Sanofi, the French drug-maker that produces Plaquenil, a brand- name version of hydroxychloroquine sold around the world, according to The New York Times.“As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi,” the Times reported. After violating his own three-day-old threat to end his daily briefings, Trump was back in the Rose Garden Monday introducing a parade of CEOs to boast about their companies’ great contribution to fighting the coronavirus. Except for a fleeting comment about the victims, none of the real heroes - the ones fighting, healing and dying on the front lines - were there or at any of his briefings.Unlike the doctors, nurses, techs and hospital workers, those invited to the White House to praise the president on live TV can be expected to be generous campaign contributors. After all, Trump’s number-one priority is getting reelected, and to do that he feels he must “liberate” the economy and the people quarantined. The numbers that worry him the most are the Dow Jones averages, not the death toll, which just passed 60,000. In fact, he is boasting that it is “only” 60,000, and he takes credit for keeping it below the 2.2 million he says was predicted if he had totally ignored the crisis, as he initially tried.The Washington Post, citing unnamed US officials, reported this week that Trump was warned of the threat in early January in his highly classified President’s Daily Brief from the intelligence agencies, however, he “routinely skips reading” them and has shown “little patience for even the oral summary.”Despite these warnings, Trump was still insisting at the end of February and into March that the number of cases would soon be “close to zero” and “it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”Trump is anxious to “liberate” the economy and get back to some semblance of normal, like everyone else, but his top scientists, like Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, are cautioning patience and telling him what he doesn’t want to hear, namely that social distancing must continue through the summer, and that there could be a second and possibly more deadly wave of the virus this fall.Dr. Trump has a solution. He is giving responsibility for fighting the virus to the governors so if anything goes wrong, he will make sure voters know who to blame, and if things go well, he will rush in to take full credit. It’s pure Trump. “I take no responsibility.” I just blew millions of your tax dollars so I could take credit for the checks you just received to help pay for groceries and rent. I am the greatest.
