Horses, Babies and a President in Rabies Mode

Donald Trump has done it again: He has turned the stage of world politics into a traveling circus arena - this time with a performance somewhere between a horse stable, a children’s ward and a YouTube conspiracy forum. “Massive” vaccinations, said the president, were being given to children like to animals in a pasture. One could literally see him mentally moving between cradle and trough: here the baby, there the horse, in between the man with the golden microphone preaching disaster.

“Vaccines can be great,” Trump boomed, “unless you put the wrong stuff in them.” What “wrong stuff” he meant, he left open. Maybe cotton candy, maybe motor oil, maybe common sense. The only certainty is this: his words fluttered like a junkyard carousel through the minds of his followers - colorful, loud, pointless, yet somehow always going in circles. The timing is no coincidence: only hours before a press conference in which his Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was set to ignite the next escalation of vaccine skepticism, Trump served up the overture as a grotesque fable. Babies, horses, syringes - the image was complete. One almost waited for him to end the fairy tale hour with a neigh and promise to protect cows from socialism in the future.

In a world where words still had meaning, this would be the moment when any president would resign or at least see a doctor. But in Trump’s America the opposite is true: the more absurd the tirades, the louder the applause. And so the bitter finding remains: while scientists struggle against pandemics, autism myths and the collapse of reason, at the top of the state stands a man who turns vaccines into horse stories. It is as if Dr. Doolittle had been chosen as health advisor - only without doctor, without knowledge, without anything except the loud neighing in his own head.