I’m going to tell you two quick stories and then explain why they’re pertinent at this precise moment in time.

During college cross country in a season where we’d go on to place second in the NCAA cross country championships, the top five guys all came down with sore Achilles tendons after an ill-advised speed workout on a cambered road. All of us were limping the next day, and I was deeply concerned about losing all that hard work so I went to the campus doctor for a checkup.

Bad Doc

He prescribed some pills and I filled the prescription that day and started taking them. Within hours I was lost in a daze. I got lost on my way to class. Couldn’t concentrate. I kept running and didn’t feel much pain. Of any kind. That lasted a couple days.

Everyone else was sore and weirded out by the injuries. Finally, our coach drove us to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota for a team checkup with a physician that graduated from our college. He took one look at the bottle of pills I’d brought along and said, “How long have you been taking this?”

“A few days,” I explained.

“Stop immediately,” he warned me. “This is a strong steroid called butazolidin. But this amount the campus doctor prescribed? This is how much they give horses.”

That was my first experience with a world on steroids.

Brain drain

Further on in life, my late wife had been going through cancer treatments for eight years before we found out that it had migrated to her brain. It wasn’t supposed to be able to do that, but it did.

She had surgery and radiation to reduce the tumor and was prescribed a powerful steroid called dexamethasone.

It completely changed her personality. She started spending money we did not have. I half-assumed that she’d been given some cash by her parents, which happened occasionally throughout our marriage.

Then she stayed up half the night researching the car she wanted us to buy. I was out of work taking care of her at the time, so I didn’t think it was the best time to be buying major purchase items. But she was adamant, so we drove to the Subaru dealer and signed the papers for a new Outback. Fortunately, my credit rating was over 800 at the time, so they didn’t ask any questions.

Not long after that, her alternating manic and sleepy behavior forced her boss at the preschool where she taught to call me. “She’s not herself,” I heard her say.

That was putting it lightly. The forceful energy and loss of inhibitions was hard to handle. The steroids had taken over her brain.

Trump on steroids

The reason I share these two harrowing, first-hand incidents is that I just read a disturbing report that President Trump received steroid treatments with dexamethasone. Then he forced people to jump into a car and drive around the streets surrounding Walter Reed hospital.

That action put everyone in his immediate environs in dire danger of contracting Covid-19. He’s needlessly (except for ego’s sake) endangering professionals whose job it is to protect him.

It’s not just the steroids that make Trump so irrepressibly irresponsible. He’s always been that way. But the idea that his sociopathic need for approval and fearful approach to losing election credibility is being exacerbated by mind-altering drugs is beyond disturbing. The fact that the White House is busy covering up the truth about Trump’s condition is not unexpected, but it is corrupt.

In other words, business as usual in the Trump era. He hid the truth about Coronavirus from the public (a fact openly admitted to journalist Bob Woodward) then politicized it by mocking those seeking to follow medical recommendations such as wearing masks and social distancing.

All Trump cared about was looking good for his date with legal security and a chance to keep the presidency and avoid being prosecuted for crimes already committed.

Now he’s on steroids. He’ll soon be acting out like the manic character George “Baby Face” Nelson in the movie Brother, Where Art Thou.

I could see Donald Trump whooping and hollering like this as they haul him off to jail after he rightly loses this election. It will probably be his dear supporters marching him through the streets once they realize how badly they’ve been hoodwinked by the Scammer In Chief.