President Trump’s championing of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential miracle cure for Covid-19—despite a lack of clinical trials and a lengthy list of side effects, such as cardiac arrest—has become one of the most controversial aspects of his administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. “What do you have to lose?” he said at his Saturday press briefing. “Take it.” It has led to shortages, hospitalizations, and at least one accidental death. And his position is being repeated all over conservative news.

After downplaying the coronavirus as a hoax engineered by mainstream media and Democrats, Fox News host Sean Hannity has recently cast himself as a medical expert, referring to himself as “Dr. Hannity.” By limiting New Yorkers’ ability to access hydroxychloroquine, Hannity wrote on Fox News’s website, Governor Andrew Cuomo “is creating a much bigger crisis in his state’s hospital system by denying New Yorkers THE CHOICE (in consultation with their doctors) to take this potentially life-saving medication.”

Hannity is just one of many figures on the right to aggressively advocate for hydroxychloroquine. The media watchdog Media Matters found that Fox News has been breathlessly evangelizing the drug to its elderly audience: 109 times over a three-day period in late March. The network also has the ear of the president, literally, creating a dangerous feedback loop. The Washington Post reported on Monday that “Fox host Laura Ingraham and two doctors who are regular on-air guests in what she dubs her ‘medicine cabinet’ visited the White House last Friday for a private meeting with Trump to talk up the drug.”

Trump’s position on hydroxychloroquine has divided his administration. A number of his advisers, most notably Rudy Giuliani, are cheerleaders for it. But others have urged caution. Over the weekend, economic adviser Peter Navarro and Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, squabbled over its efficacy during a meeting of the administration’s coronavirus task force, per an Axios report. After Fauci told Navarro that there was only “anecdotal” evidence that the drug was effective in treating the coronavirus, Navarro exploded. Pointing to a series of studies—none of which, it should be noted, were double-blinded, the “gold standard” for accuracy—Navarro said, “That’s science, not anecdote.”

The right’s embrace of hydroxychloroquine points to a larger distrust of elite expertise, even in the midst of a crisis. The president, desperate to stem the damage of an outbreak that he personally exacerbated through negligence and denial, is consulting Fox News hosts and hucksters alongside the country’s top experts. Conservative media is following his lead, while also assembling a narrative that can be used to defend the president down the line: that the president’s opponents are suppressing a miracle drug in order to damage the country economically and the president politically.

