Actually, they didn’t. On Thursday evening, medical experts took to Twitter — not to mention contacting almost any reporter who would listen — to beg and plead with Americans to not listen to the president, after he appeared to suggest that doctors should consider prescribing a disinfectant to rid the body of covid-19.

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“I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump told a stunned nation Thursday. “One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?"

Amazingly, this wasn’t the only bizarre cure-all Trump pitched Thursday. He also ordered federal officials to look into the curative powers of ... sunlight. He told Deborah Birx, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator who is also serving on the coronavirus task force, that she should, and I quote exactly, “speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure. You know — but if you could..”

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Americans are notoriously disdainful of intellectuals and experts. When those resentments meet our age of self-help and magical thinking, you get President Trump.

Lack of knowledge does not deter Trump, because he believes he possesses it. Over the past several months, he has turned the daily White House coronavirus task force briefing into medical sideshow meets self-help rally, with him playing the role of carnival barker, emcee, motivational speaker and door-to-door salesman of miracle quack cures.

Trump touted hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, as another miracle cure. When Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, publicly told him there was no reason to believe this would work, Trump overruled him based on — I swear — “a feeling.”

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Fox News — it’s always Fox News — enables this grotesque malpractice. Host Laura Ingraham even boasted of “Lazarus”-like patient recoveries after hydroxychloroquine treatment. But here’s what happened next. First, a man in Arizona died after he took the closely related chloroquine phosphate, thinking he might have coronavirus. Then, this week, a study came out showing that not only was the drug useless against coronavirus, but also that patients given it were more likely to die. So much for “a feeling.”

(Ingraham simply moved on. She hosted Rudy Giuliani on Thursday night, bashing contact tracing. “We should trace everyone for cancer. And heart disease,” he claimed.)

None of this should surprise. Trump attempted to cut funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in his most recent budget, backing down only last month. He dinged the pandemic response team, saying, “We can build up very, very quickly” — seemingly unaware that there is a difference between advance planning and a last-minute scramble. Trump has even permitted Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to put a former Labradoodle breeder in charge of a coronavirus response team. (This is barking mad. The man isn’t even a veterinarian.)

But why worry? The president’s got a “hunch” or an “idea” or a “feeling.” If it doesn’t work out, he can claim the next day, as he did Friday, he was simply asking a “sarcastic” question. Trump is in charge, and he is an expert.

Or not.