As he lies to the public day after day about everything under the sun—including some version or other of his supposedly outstanding education and “stable genius”—I turn to the above-linked Internet item. It begins in part: “The late professor William T. Kelley taught marketing at Wharton School of Business and Finance, University of Pennsylvania, for 31 years, ending with his retirement in 1982. Kelley, who also had vast experience as a business consultant, was the author of a then-widely used textbook called ‘Marketing Intelligence: The Management of Marketing Information’. . . Kelley taught marketing management both to undergraduate and graduate students at Wharton. Dr. Bill was one of my closest friends for 47 years when we lost him at 94 about six years ago. He would have been 100 this year. 

“Donald J. Trump was an undergraduate student at Wharton for the latter two of his college years, having graduated in 1968. Professor Kelley told me 100 times over three decades that ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.’ I remember his emphasis and inflection — it went like this: ‘DONALD TRUMP WAS THE DUMBEST GODDAMN STUDENT I EVER HAD.’ Kelley told me this after Trump had become a celebrity, but long before he was considered a political figure. Kelley often referred to Trump’s arrogance when he told the story that Trump came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything . . .” (continued in foregoing and other links)

A typical Trump lie is one of those based on the global coronavirus outbreak, The Washington Post reports. Trump “has been a font of misinformation and fishy data. It was only a matter of time before he cast blame on former president Barack Obama.” And, of course, Obama is a half-black former president whom Trump probably still insists was born in Kenya and would blame in some way for climate change if he could bring himself to admit that it’s real.

“The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing,” Donald said this past week. “and we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can die place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion.” But, as the Post explained, there was no such Obama Rule, “simply” guidance documents from 2014 that were acted upon because Congress stepped in and decided to write legislation instead. “The Trump administration, in fact, has been working with Congress on such legislation.

“The question revolves around laboratory-developed tests (LDTs). These are generally described as in vitro diagnostic tests (think of a test tube) designed, manufactured and used within a single laboratory. The Food and Drug Administration, under a 1976 law, regulates medical devices, but generally did not regulate LDTs. Then, in 1914, the FDA released ‘draft guidance’ making the case for phasing in LDT regulations.

“There was immediate blowback from the medical community, and the FDA essentially punted on its effort to write regulations and deferred to Congress. The 2014 guidance was formally withdrawn before Trump took office.”

AS FOR THE CORONAVIRUS, it’s not so much that more-infected countries are making greater inroads in containing the virus, while we in the U.S. are struggling ineffectively to keep the pandemic at bay. China and South Korea are doing 5- to 10,000 tests per day, while the U.S. overall has managed only some 5,000 tests in total since attention to the crisis has begun. Our medical infrastructure has been ignored and allowed to decay in recent years while our attention has been directed to the pointless and empty self-admiration of Donald J. Trump.

Here’s a bit of comment March 6 made by our president as he visited the Center for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta: “I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said during his brief appearance wearing one of his “rah rah” caps. He made note of a “great, super-genius uncle” who taught at MIT and suggested such genius must run in the family genes. “People are really surprised I understand this stuff,” he said. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

However, follow-up comments and questions by doctors and scientists scrambling to contain the deadly disease seemed to be a nuisance to Trump. “Anyone who wants a test will get a test; that’s the bottom line,” he concluded. Yeah, sure.

DONALD TRUMP TOLD AIDES last week that he was concerned journalists would purposefully contract COVID-19 in an attempt to infect him on Air Force One.