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President Donald Trump at a coronavirus press briefing on Saturday. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Business Insider

President Donald Trump always acts like the smartest person in the room. But when it comes to dispensing medical advice and science, there are smarter people standing right next to him.

He can't seem to decide from one day to the next whether the coronavirus is just a bad flu or whether the pandemic is so serious that he's now a "wartime president."

And while he didn't tell the American public to drink fish-tank cleaner to cure the virus, as some in the media have intimated, he's still spreading dangerous misinformation.

Now he wants to "reopen" the US in less than three weeks, against the advice of his administration's experts, and that could have deadly consequences.

If he were as smart as he believes himself to be, he'd step back, shut his mouth, and humbly defer to the scientists who know what they're talking about.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

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President Donald Trump has long carried himself like a person who knows he's the smartest one in the room.

But someone needs to tell him that when he's standing beside world-class scientists and medical professionals in the middle of a pandemic, he'd be wise to listen and not speak.

This isn't an Atlantic City casino or "The Apprentice"; this could be the gravest global moment of the century. And while Trump's shoot-from-the-hip bravado helped get him to the White House, he could be endangering lives by contradicting the experts at his own public coronavirus briefings and sending constantly shifting messages about the threat of the disease.

Trump can't decide whether he thinks the coronavirus is serious

At various points over the past two months, Trump has thought of the novel coronavirus as serious enough to bar visitors from China from the US. Later, he said the virus could miraculously "disappear." Then it was "something that we have tremendous control over." Last week, the crisis was sufficiently dire for him to declare himself a "wartime president."

Now he's openly mocking the country's top medical experts, who he says would keep the country on lockdown for "two years" were it not for his very stable genius in ignoring their advice.

It's only day nine of "The President's 15 Days to Slow the Spread" guidelines, but the president said during a Fox News town hall on Tuesday that he wanted the country "opened up" and "raring to go by Easter."

That's April 12, barely three weeks from now. The alternative, Trump said, was a depression and "suicides by the thousands."

Trump was back to comparing this historic pandemic with a bad flu season, and he suggested Americans "socially distance ourselves and go to work," which is an inherent contradiction. He added that people should clean their hands "five times more than they used to."

The famously germaphobic Trump added: "You don't have to shake hands anymore with people. That might be something good coming out of this."

No, Trump didn't tell anyone to drink fish-tank cleaner. He's still dangerous when he talks about the coronavirus.

Let's get a couple of things out of the way: Trump did not tell Americans to self-medicate with hydroxychloroquine, and he certainly didn't advise them to go rifling through their household products to find substitute pandemic panaceas.

Intimations that Trump is personally responsible for an Arizona couple choosing to scoop fish-tank cleaner into a cup and drink it, without consulting a doctor or seemingly anyone because it contained the ingredient Trump mentioned, are unnecessary cheap shots.

They are own goals by the media, and they're the kind of low-hanging fruit that Trump and "MAGA world" salivate upon, because they make it easier to dismiss anything the "media" reports about the president as "the fake news." And that's dangerous.

Now let's address why the president is considerably more dangerous when he mouths off half-cocked about the government's response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

It's not unreasonable to argue that Trump's frequent touting of hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus wonder drug, and falsely claiming that a medical-grade version had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, is dangerously sowing confusion.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, flatly refuted Trump's claim that the drug had been proved a safe and effective treatment for coronavirus.

But Trump will always have the louder microphone, and the bad information from the politician who has engaged in dangerous anti-vaccine misinformation will always drown out the good information from the doctor who has trained his entire career to be a leading voice during a pandemic.

If people believe the cure is right around the corner (which it is not), they may be more inclined to ignore social-distancing orders and other recommended measures for preventing an even more devastating spread of the virus.

Should Trump sow enough public distrust in the government's medical experts, people may rebel against the government's imposed limits on their freedom of movement. It would not be difficult to imagine the potential for violence among a quarantined populace, as happened in China in 2003 during the SARS epidemic.

There's a debate to be had about whether the country's sudden and severe economic disaster is too steep a price to "flatten the curve." But a thoughtful public debate is not what Trump is trying to spark. Rather, Trump is following his familiar playbook.

He's mocking the egghead experts as out of touch with the "real Americans" who love him. He's promising to deliver a cure that's nowhere near imminent. And he's positioning himself as the only one brave and tough enough to take on "the establishment," and declare the country open for business again, coronavirus be damned.

If he were as smart as he believes himself to be, he'd step back, shut his mouth, and humbly defer to the scientists who know what they're talking about.

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