Trump’s deadly advice is putting Americans in danger – but don’t count on Mike Pence to do something about removing him

The vice president has stood nodding like a dog next to the US leader at coronavirus press briefings. The likelihood of him standing up for his country now is slim, writes Matthew Norman

Yes-man: Pence is with Trump whatever the stakes (Getty)

The coronavirus era’s first traceable case of Death By Trump has taken place in Arizona – and if the abomination has his way, more almost beyond counting lie ahead.

Within minutes of Boris Johnson belatedly closing down Britain, the orange, tanned ape informed a presser of his desire to unlock America within days.

Earlier yesterday had come news of that inaugural DBT. Inspired by their president’s blind faith in the anti-malarial chloroquine as a magic bullet – he has “a good feeling”, so you can take that to the bank; or in this instance, the morgue – a couple in Arizona took a prophylactic dose of chloroquine phosphate. She survived. He did not.

In Donald Trump’s defence, to use as unlikely a phrase as these fingers will ever type, no jury could convict him of homicide. The pair took the drug in the form of a fish-tank cleaner.

Morally, however, this is manslaughter by grotesque negligence. Anyone in the same zip code as normality understands that, in the age of petrifaction, those with more trust in their president than IQ points would clutch at potentially fatal straws.

That pretty much describes Trump himself. His trust in his own omniscience has added medical quackery to the abundant honours board of grifting techniques. He is peddling a drug not clinically trialled for this disease in the feverish sprint to reinflate the Dow Jones in good time for election day in early November.

If the recklessness ended with that death in Arizona, it would be a lone tragedy enough. But his ambition results in boosting another index, the death toll, by colossal amounts.

While Johnson was languidly waking to the scale of the menace, Trump has been visibly shifting in the other direction.

There have been rumours that his leading infectivity adviser, Anthony Fauci, has been banished from the media conferences for telling the truth. After putting his head in his hands over a Trump reference to the “deep state”, Fauci warned against jumping the gun on chloroquine and a similar drug with anecdotal promise, but which need extensive dose and toxicity testing before being safely prescribed.

The west wing battle between economists and virologists is being won by the former. Weeks after Dominic Cummings abandoned his alleged calculation (strongly denied) that elderly lives were a price worth paying to salvage GDP, Trump is poised to put this demented theory into practice.

Unless he is dissuaded from relaxing restrictions across the US, as soon as early next week, the consequences bear no imagining.

As things stand, the charts show the viral surge in America to be steeper than anywhere else.

With increased intra and inter-state freedom of movement, that growth line would go vertical. If 60 per cent of Americans became infected, and with as low a mortality rate as half a per cent, a million would die.

It’s at this point that I find myself pausing in the grip of paralytic incredulity as the reality of that cascades through the synaptic pathways.

Is it seriously possible that even Trump would allow so many to die in order to hike stock indices in the cause of re-election?

Apparently, it is. If the natural assumption before was that he would burn half the galaxy for Wisconsin’s electoral votes, the proof may be imminent.

In the annals of human callousness, there can’t have been many instances of cultivated brutality on such a scale. Mao’s famines might be one modern yardstick for conscious mass killing in the drive for economic growth.

That the economic consequences for the US (and the world) would be cataclysmic – with untold millions infected, the ensuing lockdown would be longer and more damaging – is crushingly obvious.

But is there anyone left within or outside the White House with the capacity to talk him out the Dr Evil masterplan? If not, the pictures emerging from US hospitals in a month will dwarf the unspeakable horror in Lombardy.

Once again, though much more urgently than ever before, the magic number that comes tauntingly to mind is 25.

If Trump persists with this monumental folly, there is technically time, just about, for his immediate removal on unfitness grounds under the 25th Amendment.

Even for the uninfected with perfect respiratory systems, breath holding is not advised. The enactment of the 25th must be led by the vice president.

At the daily presser, Mike Pence stands to Trump’s left nodding like Churchill (not the wartime demigod; the insurance dog).

Pence is more likely to invest in a boot camp that turns straight people gay than act in defence of his country.

If Trump broke off from boasting about his perfect handling of the erstwhile hoax, and declared he will be deploying the nukes he never got around to using for hurricane dispersal against it, Pence would salute his magnificent leadership.

Speaking of nukes, ask yourself this: If Trump is willing to condemn to death a million compatriots – a vast majority from the age demographic, by the way, most loyal to him – to hoist the Nasdaq, by what logic would he not use weapons of mass destruction for political advantage?

A little voice still whispers that he will recoil at the last; that even if Fauci is on the naughty step, the governors of New York, California and elsewhere, allied to a tranche of saner Republican senators, will badger him into grudging self-restraint.

But that might be the vapid, pointless little voice of wishful thinking.

For now, the confirmation that he is capable of blithely considering allowing mass fatalities is as much as the averagely frail human mind can take.

As for that poor Arizonan widow, chloroquine proved a miracle cure for one dangerous pathogen – potentially lethal credulity – if not the one she and her late husband had in mind. “Don’t believe anything...” she warned America, “...the president says.”

If that unoriginal but poignant advice falls on 200 million deaf ears – and a third of Americans take Trump’s advice to resume life as before – there could very well be a couple of million dead ears before long.