"President Donald Trump, faced with a death toll of over 50,000 Americans from a pandemic he once said was “totally under control,” is increasingly coping by launching frequent trial balloons of far-fetched ideas to try to end the outbreak and get America back to work.
On Thursday, it was injecting disinfectant into one’s body to get rid of the coronavirus and using sunlight to do the trick, too. (On Friday, after widespread mockery, he claimed he was merely joking.) A week earlier, the president was claiming “total authority” to decide when states reopen only to say later that it was up to governors. Before that, he was touting as a cure-all the malaria pill hydroxychloroquine, despite his health advisers’ concerns that the drug was an unproven and possibly unsafe remedy. He called for “packed churches” for Easter Sunday, a wildly unrealistic timeline that he had to walk back under withering pressure.
Some of Trump’s would-be quick fixes have more grounding in reality. In late March, he bragged that a fast new diagnostic test for the virus was “a whole new ballgame” — and aides rushed to bring it to market. But while impressive, the speedier tests have run into supply bottlenecks, and health experts have warned of unacceptably high error rates.
It’s a pattern that has repeated itself throughout Trump’s presidency in which Trump grasps for new ideas (often by what he sees on television), shortcuts and anything that can deliver hope and high ratings as the clock nears six months to the election. And those who know the president best say that even a crisis that has devastated American families and brought the economy to a standstill has hardly changed him at all.
“He continues to lead by floating trial balloons, gauging how those trial balloons are being received and then adjusting along the way,” said a person close to the White House. “He launches the trial balloons as he sees fit and then the adjustment comes after everyone starts chiming in after being sort of blindsided by the original trial balloon.”"
http://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/24/trump-coronavirus-same-207221
| 