An ocean of Kool-Aid was guzzled on Laura Ingraham's show last night

Laura Ingraham was one of the very first hard-core Trumpists. In 2015, when several appealing and viable Republican candidates for president were still in the running, she started disingenuously framing the race as a dichotomy between the Very Stable Genius and Jeb Bush, who was polling near the bottom of the pack.

Since then, she's spent every microsecond of her professional life burnishing her bona fides as a throne-sniffer.

She outdid herself last night on her FNC program. She had the nation's premier expert on the coronavirus pandemic, followed by a psychologist better known as a television personality and book hustler than he is for the field in which he's trained.

She was set straight by Anthony Fauci when she tried the couldn't-it-just-go-away line on him:

“On the question of a vaccine, we don’t have a vaccine for SARS,” Ingraham said. “We don’t have a vaccine for HIV, and life did go on, right? So the idea that we’re definitely going to have a vaccine, we didn’t really approach much else in the same way as we’re pegging going back to normal with a vaccine, did we?”

Fauci responded by pointing out the stark differences between HIV, the virus that caused SARS and the novel coronavirus. He said HIV was “entirely different” because researchers developed effective treatments that allow people to live with HIV/AIDS. And SARS, he said, disappeared on its own, which ended efforts to develop a vaccine.

“I think it is a little bit misleading, maybe, to compare what we’re going through now with HIV or SARS,” Fauci told Ingraham. “They’re really different.”

“But, we don’t know,” Ingraham said in response. “This could disappear. I mean, SARS did pretty much disappear. This could as well, correct?”

“You know, anything could, Laura,” Fauci said. “But I have to tell you, the degree of efficiency of transmissibility of this is really unprecedented in anything that I’ve seen. It’s an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmitting from one person to another. Those kind of viruses don’t just disappear.” 

Fauci spent the rest of his time on “The Ingraham Angle” explaining the need for a piecemeal approach to reopening the economy. He stressed that states should meet all of the criteria in each phase of the White House’s guidelines before moving on to the next and remaining vigilant, and willing to close down again, for renewed outbreaks.

Next up was Dr. Phil, who peddles the "reasoning" that other causes of death statistically dwarf COVID-19:

Dr. Phil, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology but is not licensed to practice medicine, spoke about the mental toll of isolation under the stay-at-home orders aimed at slowing the spread of coronavirus. He suggested more people will suffer mental-health issues, like anxiety and depression, because of job losses and economic impacts of the pandemic than will catch the virus.

That’s when the TV psychologist compared coronavirus deaths to those caused by automobile accidents, smoking and drowning. Fauci has criticized the comparison to car accidents in the past, calling it a “false equivalency.” 

“We have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don’t shut the country down for that,” Dr. Phil said.

Memo to Dr. Phil: none of those forms of checking out are contagious.

Ingraham's show is preceded by one hosted by another of the original slavish leg-humpers, Sean Hannity, who had as his guest Dr. Oz, another television personality and book hustler. He's better known as a pop health consultant that as a surgeon, which he also is.

Dr. Oz's remarks were so offensive he's since had to apologize:

Dr. Oz is backtracking on comments he made on Fox News amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The TV doc (real name: Mehmet Oz) faced backlash for saying on Hannity that schools should reopen to get the country going again — as that “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.” He said those deaths “might be a trade-off some folks would consider.”

The Dr. Oz Show host has since apologized, saying he he “misspoke” when he minimized the risk and potential loss of life.

“I’ve realized my comments about risks around opening schools have confused and upset people, which was never my intention,” he said in a recorded video. “I misspoke. As a heart surgeon, I spent my career fighting to save lives in the operating room by minimizing risks.”

He continued, “At the same time, I’m being asked constantly: How will we be able to get people back to their normal lives. To do that, one of the important steps will be figuring out how do we get our children safely back to school. We know for many kids, school is a place of security, nutrition and learning that is missing right now. These are issues we are all wrestling with and I will continue looking for solutions to beat this virus.”

Earlier today, I posted an essay at Precipice, my Substack page,  on the essentiality of extending grace wherever possible at this precarious moment. I understand that the case could be made that there's little grace to be detected in what I'm writing here. About that I say this: seeking to be an agent of grace at every opportunity does not preclude pointing out the dissemination of poison. Trumpism, when heated to a boil, is a poisonous flavor of Kool-Aid and must be recognized as such. It leads people under its spell to abandon all sense of responsibility in order to advance the glorification of their cult leader.

It cannot go unremarked upon.