William of Ockham, a 14th-century friar and logician, is known for having written, “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate.” Translating his Latin into colloquial English, we get this: “The simplest explanation is the best.”

That’s wise advice when assessing Trump. Last night, when I heard him voice his desire to boost the stock market by putting Americans back to work (thus boosting the illness stats and death toll), I figured that the simplest explanation for his latest fit of madness was easily the best:

He’s bored with the virus. He’s tired of talking about it. The whole thing is a downer – a “loser,” in his parlance – and he doesn’t want to look like a loser.

So instead he’ll play the mayor in Jaws and coax everybody back into the water: “America will again and soon be open for business very soon. Lot sooner than three or four months somebody was suggesting. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem.” And the word “somebody” is his back-of-the-hand reference to all the doctors, scientists, epidemiologists, and nurses who are working the front lines at risk to their own health.

Or perhaps “somebody” was a reference to Dr. Anthony Fauci, our top infectious disease expert, who was conspicuously absent last night as our faux Marcus Welby prattled on. (Fauci, on NBC last Friday: “I cannot see that all of a sudden, next week or two weeks from now it’s going to be over. I don’t think there’s a chance of that.”) Or perhaps “somebody” was a reference to the U.S. Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, who said the other day that “we really, really need everyone to stay at home…Right now, there are not enough people out there who are taking this seriously.”

Yeah. Starting with guess who.

At the dawn of Trump’s dystopia, in January 2017, some of my friends got tired of hearing me say that “this guy is going to get a lot of people killed.” I wrongly assumed it would happen in a needless war, and that the casualties would be our volunteer soldiers. This is much worse. This is tantamount to sacrificing civilian lives on the altar of the Dow.

You know the crazy uncle you see once a year at Thanksgiving, who’s placed at the far end of the table so that a minimal number of family members get exposed to his ignorance? Now he’s behind the podium with a daily dog and pony show. For instance, last night he said: “You look at automobile accidents that are far greater (in yearly fatalities than the current virus death toll), but that doesn’t mean we won’t tell people not to drive cars.”

Yes, each year there are roughly 37,000 car deaths and three million injuries. But those tragedies don’t threaten to overwhelm the entire health care system. They don’t trigger a nationwide shortage of ventilators and masks and testing swabs. They don’t sicken or kill doctors and other health care workers. And they don’t increase exponentially every day.

We have a choice: We can listen to people who know what they’re talking about – or we can listen to a guy who’s so far over his head that if he were fitted with a snorkel, he’d still drown in a kiddie pool.

We can listen, for instance, to preparedness expert Tom Inglesby, who directs the John Hopkins Center for Health Security. A small sampling from his latest tweet thread:

“How do we gain time to let hospitals get more supplies & prepare for high number of patients? How do we lower the speed of spread of COVID in US? How do we lower odds that ICUs will run out of vents, hospitals run out of space? The answer for now is large scale social distancing…

“In Asia, we’ve seen these interventions work to lower pace of the epidemic, lower numbers of critically ill, lower the number of people who get COVID. In Asia where big social distancing measures have been in place for two months, they have had very strong impact…

“These big social distancing measures take time to work…To drop all these measures now would be to accept that COVID patients will get sick in extraordinary numbers all over the country, far beyond what the US health care system could bear.”

We can listen to people like Inglesby, or we can do what an Arizona couple did. The other day, the husband and wife, both in their sixties, heard Doctor Trump extol the miracle benefits of chloroquine, which is used to treat malaria. He suggested that maybe it could protect Americans from getting the virus. Well, Mr. and Mrs. happened to have the ingredient in the house. They swallowed some. She got sick and her husband died. Asked later where they got the idea, the wife said: “I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?'”

Yup, the quack was indeed talking about it on the TV. If that tragedy isn’t MAGA in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.