"In 2020, I feared the worst with Donald Trump, and here we are"

A fascist incapable of stringing two sentences together logically has plunged the United States into chaos, and is dragging much of the world into it, to the indifference or with the half-hearted support of a significant portion of our politicians and media, who seem to consider racial hatred and misogyny as subjects for informed debate, and their propagators as martyrs to free speech.

"Friends often ask me if I'm afraid. I'm not afraid. But if there's something that's been giving me nightmares from the start, it's the situation in the United States, where I have many friends. France is having a hard time with the lockdown, but despite the insurrectional climate of the last few months, a kind of resilience exists, which is running through the country, from which solidarity initiatives are born, towards caregivers, towards the elderly... In the United States, the situation is radically different, with a sociopath in charge, a useful idiot of Covid, one day falling in love with Doctor Raoult's elixir: "People just have to try. What have we got to lose?", the next day considering that the peak of the epidemic has passed and that we have to go back to work. »

In front of the Ohio Capitol, 13th April 2020, photo Joshua A.Bickel )

This column in the Pandemic Journal dates from April 20, 2020, and the french newspaper Libération illustrated it with this hallucinatory photo of a MAGA horde huddled in front of the closed doors of a federal building in Ohio, while Trump urged his fans on Twitter to "liberate" the states whose governors were trying to implement barrier measures.

Five and a half years later, my concern at the time has radically changed. I feared the worst, and on the medical level, as on the political level, we are there. 

A fascist incapable of stringing two sentences together logically has plunged the United States into chaos, and is dragging much of the world into it, to the indifference or with the half-hearted support of a significant portion of our politicians and media, who seem to consider racial hatred and misogyny as subjects for informed debate, and their propagators as martyrs to free speech.

Donald Trump's latest "medical" statement, this Monday, September 22, 2025, had been teased the day before during the memorial service for Charlie Kirk: "Tomorrow, we're going to have one of the biggest announcements... medically, I think, in the history of our country... I think you're going to find this extraordinary. I think we've found a solution to autism." » The next day, flanked by his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist convinced that the Covid pandemic was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese, the president, who during his previous term had raised the idea of ​​injecting himself with bleach to destroy the coronavirus, declared that he had discovered the cause of autism: paracetamol (called acetaminophen in the US, and which he seems unable to pronounce correctly) and vaccines.

Around the world, doctors and fact-checkers reacted, pointing out that this accusation of the painkiller has no scientific basis. But I won't detail here the studies debunking Trump's claims. There's no need to mention Brandolini's Law to understand that this is a waste of time. This medical announcement, sold with a salesman's spiel: "I've waited 20 years for this meeting... It's not that everything is 100% understood or known, but I think we've made a lot of strides." It's just another way for a suspected rapist and child molester to once again distract the media and his electorate from the Epstein Files, which are weighing down his second term even more than the growing economic consequences of his negligence.

But beyond the disastrous medical consequences of this meaningless announcement, the target of Trump and the religious zealots around him is clearly determined: women. Under the pretext of protecting them, pregnant women are advised against using the painkiller by the specialist in hydroxychloroquine and bleach: "Taking paracetamol is not good... All pregnant women should consult their doctor to limit the use of this medication during their pregnancy. Do not take paracetamol. There is no downside. Fight like hell not to take it!" As Stéphanie Lamy, a specialist in the analysis of disinformation and author of Agora Toxica: la société incivile à l’heure d’Internet, ed. du détour, points out: "The fact-checking approach... assumes that the conflict is about facts, whereas it is about the authority to tell the truth. The Trumpist regime does not recognize science as a source of truth. For several years, and even more so since Charlie Kirk's death, it has been structured around a Christofascist matrix: the only normative truth is of biblical origin. »

The Handmaid's Tale

In Genesis (Gen 3:16), God punishes the woman for having touched the forbidden fruit of knowledge: "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you will bear your children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." The discourse of Trumpist zealots like Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk on the place of women, destined only to bear children to demographically rearm the country, remaining at home under the domination of their husbands, is at the center of the Christofascist virile project. As Stéphanie Lamy says: "Faced with this, fact-checking fails: correcting a false scientific correlation does not respond to a project that aims to substitute authoritarian theology for scientific rationality. In a sense, fact-checking depoliticizes, because it shifts the conflict from the terrain of power and ideology to that of information. What we are facing is not accidental disinformation, but a theocratic political project. The question, then, is not only "Is Trump telling the truth?", but also "Who has the authority to tell the truth?" Recognizing and naming this Christofascist project is a prerequisite for academic and citizen journalistic work to truly resist the erasure of democracy."

Christian Lehmann is a writer and a general practitioner of medecine, M.D.

This article was published in France in Libération, on the 24th of September 2025.