Let us be precise about what we know.
We know that Donald Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States, suggested in a nationally televised briefing that injecting disinfectant into the human body might be worth exploring as a therapeutic intervention against a respiratory virus. He said this in front of the Director of the CDC, the Surgeon General, and approximately eighty million Americans who were watching because they were frightened and looking for guidance. He said it with the specific confidence of a man who has just had an idea and has not yet subjected the idea to any of the intermediate steps that normally occur between having an idea and announcing it to the country.
We know that he suggested, in the same briefing, that shining ultraviolet light inside the body might also be worth investigating. He gestured at his own torso when he said this. He appeared to be referring to his lungs. He did not explain how the light would get there, which is a detail he has never once considered his responsibility. In the days after, poison control centers reported spikes in calls, because some number of Americans, following the televised medical guidance of their commander in chief, drank cleaning products. We do not have a precise casualty figure, because “died taking the president’s health advice literally” is not a line item the CDC breaks out separately, though at the current trajectory it may eventually have to.
We know that he believed, and stated publicly on multiple occasions, that hurricanes could be addressed with nuclear weapons. Not managed. Not monitored. Nuked. He raised this with Homeland Security officials who then had to explain to the President of the United States that detonating a nuclear device inside a hurricane would not stop the hurricane but would instead produce a radioactive hurricane, a storm that now also gives you cancer, which it would then distribute across the Eastern Seaboard onto the states that voted for him. He reportedly found this explanation unsatisfying and returned to the idea on subsequent occasions, which means that at least twice, sober and unprompted, the man with sole launch authority over the American nuclear arsenal had to be talked out of using it on the weather.
We know that he has taken a cognitive screening test designed to detect the early presence of dementia, a test whose tasks include identifying a drawing of a lion, copying a cube, and repeating five words in sequence, and that he has described this test as evidence of “extreme intelligence,” specifically singling out his successful recall of the words “person, woman, man, camera, TV” as an achievement of note, and that he has posted about this score on social media with the energy of a man who has just been informed he is the smartest person in recorded history and wants to make sure you heard. The neurologist who invented the test noted that the words Trump described do not appear on any version of it, and that the test is not, in any clinical sense, a measurement of intelligence. Trump has not updated his position.
We know that he launched military strikes against a country he subsequently referred to as “the Islamic Republic of Japan.” We know that he called the president of Ukraine, a man he had spoken with on the phone days earlier and was sitting directly beside at a joint press conference, “President Putin,” and then, when corrected, said it again, and then claimed it was intentional, and that the video of him not knowing it was not intentional exists and is available on every device connected to the internet. We know that he threatened to cut off trade with Spain at a NATO security summit because Spain had not met a defense spending target to his satisfaction, the way a person might flip over a board game when the dice do not cooperate. We know that he has claimed to have “settled eight wars,” a figure that does not correspond to any accounting of actual geopolitical conflicts that any historian, journalist, or diplomat has been able to produce.
We know that he has recommended people look into whether windmills cause cancer. He has suggested that electric vehicles will not work when it is cold, which is a claim that has been tested extensively by the market and found to be largely incorrect, but which he has repeated with the certainty of a man who heard something once near a golf cart and filed it. He has stated that noise from windmills makes cows not give milk and birds drop from the sky in what he described as a “carnage” of avian casualties that ornithologists have not been able to locate in any database.
He has mused publicly that raking the floors of forests would prevent wildfires, and cited Finland as a country that does this, and when Finnish officials were asked about the forest raking they said they did not rake their forests, and one noted with admirable restraint that Finland has a great deal of forest and that raking it would be a significant undertaking even if it were advisable, which it is not. He has suggested that maybe the oceans are warming because of volcanoes on the bottom of the ocean floor, a hypothesis that climate scientists received with the expression of people who have been doing this for a long time and have developed excellent poker faces.
He has publicly endorsed the use of hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19 to a degree that created international shortages of the drug for the lupus patients who actually needed it. He suggested that maybe you could eat less and the weight would “just come off,” which is not false but is also not the insight of a man who has examined the medical literature on obesity with any rigor, and which he offered as dietary counsel while his personal physician was recommending continued weight loss guidance and his own HHS Secretary was saying publicly that he did not know how Trump was alive.
So. Paint chips.
There is, to be clear, no confirmed report of Donald Trump consuming paint chips. No former staffer has come forward. No photographic evidence exists. No Mar-a-lago employee has described finding paint chip residue in the vicinity of a freshly gnawed baseboard. The record, on this specific point, is clean.
And yet.
The man suggested injecting bleach. The man thought a hurricane was a target. The man announced his cognitive test score the way a golden retriever announces that it has retrieved the tennis ball, with the full expectation of praise and the complete absence of any understanding of why the praise might be complicated. The man cannot find Iran on a map while actively bombing it, cannot identify the Ukrainian president while seated beside him, and cannot pass a dementia screening tool without subsequently describing it as proof that he is, and this is a direct quote, “cognitively advanced.”
If someone called you tomorrow and said “I have it on good authority that Trump has been eating paint chips,” you would not hang up. You would ask which kind. You would ask how long. You would ask whether it was the lead-based kind, and then you would go quiet, because a small and disloyal part of you would recognize that lead poisoning presents as impaired judgment, impulsivity, memory loss, and erratic aggression, and that this would not be a diagnosis so much as a tidy retroactive explanation for the last decade of American history. And then the paint chips would simply take their place in the inventory alongside the bleach and the light and the hurricane nukes and the forest raking and the windmill cancer and the Islamic Republic of Japan, and the inventory would absorb them without effort, the way it absorbs everything, because the inventory has no bottom and never has.
We cannot prove he eats paint chips.
We cannot prove he doesn’t.
At this point, the documentation supports a generous prior.