Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Trump gives a thumbs-up on the Truman Balcony upon his return to the White House Monday from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was treated for COVID-19.
Trump is taking a cocktail of drugs that includes the powerful steroid dexamethasone. According to the Mayo Clinic, common side effects of dexamethasone include paranoia and grandiosity. The drug’s own warning label cautions about “psychic derangements,” mood swings, insomnia, and “frank psychotic manifestations.”
This, of course, is Trump’s baseline clinical condition. If there is any man on the planet who did not need mind-bending drugs, it is Donald Trump.
One of the effects of dexamethasone is to produce bursts of energy, euphoria, and a sense of invulnerability. In the past day, Trump has clinically demonstrated the impact of steroids enhancing his usual lunacy, disordered thinking, and moment-to-moment self-contradiction.
“I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young,” Trump said. But in a video directed to seniors, he confided that he is actually old:
“To my favorite people in the world, the seniors,” he said in the video. “I’m a senior. I know you don’t know that. Nobody knows that. Maybe you don’t have to tell them. But I’m a senior.”
Who knew?
Trump, demonstrating textbook paranoia, also blasted his own Cabinet, even the slavish toady Attorney General Bill Barr, for insufficiently fervent loyalty.
What’s next? After he returned to the White House, Trump stood on a balcony, Mussolini style. Let’s see whether he thinks he can fly.
Steroid use can also produce emotional crashes. The question is not whether Trump will crash, but how.
