Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The presidency is preeminently a place of moral leadership.”

Donald Trump, May 18, 2020: “A lot of good things have come out about the hydroxy. A lot of good things have come out…I happen to be taking it. I’m taking it – hydroxychloroquine – right now.”

Can this sick puppy make it through a single news cycle without disgracing himself anew, and degrading what was once the most respected public office on the planet? I wasted keystrokes even asking.

His latest farcical proclamation is that he’s taking “hydroxy” on a daily basis in order to ward off Covid-19 – despite the dearth of scientific evidence that the anti-malaria drug works as a preventative, and despite the actual scientific evidence that it can trigger hallucinations and heart failure. If indeed he’s telling the truth, if indeed an obese 73-year-old with a junk-food diet is gambling with his health, he’s clearly being irresponsible – while signaling his cultists to follow his lead.

On the other hand, maybe he’s just lying about the whole thing. That would certainly be in character. Maybe he’s just tripling down on his past quackery about “hydroxy” because he’s cognitively incapable of admitting error. If so, that’s arguably even more irresponsible – because he’d still be signaling his cultists to take the drug, while demonstrating, yet again, his unfitness for the job he inexplicably holds.

By the way, if he thinks that his drug announcement (true or not) will distract us from his latest authoritarian actions – firing the inspector generals who are tasked with holding regimes accountable – he’s dreaming. We have the bandwidth to monitor all forms of odious behavior.

So with respect to the “hydroxy” story, I’m reminded of something that Republican Senator James Lankford said shortly after he voted for Trump in the 2016 election: “What I really look for in a presidential candidate is someone who is a great role model, and I didn’t get that this time. I didn’t have that person who I would say is a great role model for my daughters and for my family.”

Granted, Lankford is one of the reasons we’re stuck with Trump’s lies and quackery in the midst of a pandemic – during the recent impeachment trial, he voted for acquittal – but his lament still rings true. A president should not be the poster child for anti-science imbecility, especially when innocent lives are on the line.

Trump’s remarks to the press yesterday were festooned with so many lies that it behooves me to only hit the highlights:

He said, “You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the front-line workers, before you catch it.” There’s no evidence that front-line workers are taking the drug as a preventative.

He said, “I get a lot of positive calls about it…I’ve heard a lot of good stories.” There’s no scientific evidence that the drug even works as a preventative, and he didn’t cite the sources of his anecdotal evidence.

He ridiculed a recent Veterans Administration study which concluded that the drug didn’t even work as a treatment for Covid patients; he said the study was conducted by “people that aren’t big Trump fans.” But he didn’t mention (or doesn’t know) that the VA study – which also correlated the drug with higher death rates – has been endorsed by the National Institutes of Health.

He assailed all skeptical studies about the drug as “phony reports.” But he didn’t mention (or doesn’t know) that the drug has been deemed useless for Covid treatment in new studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And if he has truly been taking the drug each day for the past week and a half, he is violating guidelines set by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA recently said the drug can be used only to treat hospitalized Covid patients – but warned that it shouldn’t be used for any reason outside of hospitals. Trump said yesterday that he got the OK from his White House doctor, which either means that the doc should lose his medical license…or that Trump is lying and that the doc hasn’t prescribed the drug at all.

That’s entirely possible, of course. White House doc Sean Conley, in a statement last night, played his own shell game. (I feel sorry for the guy.) He said he’s had “numerous discussions” with Trump about “the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine. We concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks.” But Conley never confirmed that he has prescribed it.

So either Trump is calling on Americans to model his behavior because he’s truly taking the drug – or because he’s not taking the drug but wants us to take it anyway. As he said again yesterday. “What do you have to lose?” (Gee, I dunno. Your sanity? Your life?)

Last summer, Robert Schmuhl, a professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, shared a yearning that still rings true: “Call me hopelessly old-fashioned, even deplorably diehard, but wanting a role model in the Oval Office shouldn’t be too outlandish a dream for Americans, young, middle-age or elderly. That heartfelt wish chooses no partisan side – just the common, and national, good.”

We can dream. Better yet, we can vote.