The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank published an extremely snarky piece on Tuesday. The title sarcastically proclaimed that “If Trump likes hydroxychloroquine, he’ll love camel urine.” The contents of the article made it perfectly clear that Milbank should seek some type of experimental drug that might cure Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Channeling his inner Joy Behar, Milbank began by announcing that he “deduced last month that he (Trump) was taking high doses of the anti-malarial drug, because he was showing obvious side effects of the hydroxychloroquine cocktail he had been taking: Confusion. Aggression. Unusual behavior. Unsteadiness. Paranoia. Change in hair color. Difficulty speaking.”
Milbank also repeated the false talking point that the drug is “not effective against the coronavirus.” While hydroxychloroquine might not have gone through the traditional process that determines the efficacy and safety of prescribing certain drugs to treat certain conditions, many who have taken the drug to treat Coronavirus have seen positive results. For example, Democratic Michigan State Representative Karen Whitsett, who has no political incentive whatsoever to praise Trump, has credited hydroxychloroquine with curing her of COVID-19.
Reacting to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s description of Trump as “morbidly obsese,” Milbank rejected that characterization; instead labelling him “garden-variety” obese with “room for many more pills, supplements, and tonics.” Eventually, Milbank urged the President to serve as a “full-time lab animal” to test other unproven methods for curing Coronavirus; arguing that would enable him to “distract himself from doing yet more damage to the country.”
For the rest of the piece, Milbank ran through a list of other unproven remedies for Coronavirus he claimed to find on Wikipedia, arguing that Trump should try them all. These remedies included “covering himself in cow dung,” and drinking cow or camel urine.
Believe it or not, the PC police might have a problem with some of Milbank’s analysis. After all, when suggesting that President Trump should cover himself in animal excrement, the Washington Post columnist noted that “some in India believe this to be particularly effective if done while performing a ritual in front of a fire.” The tone that Milbank used when describing unorthodox Coronavirus cures embraced by other countries might invite accusations of “xenophobia.”
While the first set of remedies proposed by Milbank were simply disgusting, some of his suggestions later in the piece were actually deadly. In Milbank’s fantasy world, “our selfless president will inhale high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide. He will inject his lungs with household cleaners. He will expose himself to all manner of light rays…He will sterilize his nostrils with cocaine.”
As the piece came to a conclusion, Milbank guaranteed that “if the president isolates himself in the Oval Office and devotes himself to doing all this and nothing else, he will be safe from the virus. And the rest of us will be safer.” In a much more likely scenario, Trump could end up “safe from the virus” by taking hydroxychloroquine. And then, the joke would be on Milbank and all of the other hydroxychloroquine conspiracy theorists.
