A friend of mine told me this week that she’d been triggered by the unhinged behavior of the incumbent President at last week’s debate. And I had to agree.

I didn’t even need to think about it. I just knew what she was talking about, instinctively. Her words were a roadmap of the lived experience of women like us, who’ve experienced men at their worst in a domestic setting.

The yelling. The interruptions. The insults. These are all part and parcel of what millions of women, all over the world, experience in the presence of a man who demands to be right at all time, even when he’s forgotten what the fight was about in the first place.

He couldn´t just take the fecking garbage out? But after the yelling, the interruptions, the insults, the garbage is still sitting there, stinking up the joint. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been resolved. But the air in the place feels heavy. A soup of disturbed electrons, angry pheromones and tears cloud it. The garbage languishes. The man sulks in his silo, as his victim wonders what just happened.

A lot of people felt as we did, for obvious reasons. The decadent, depraved first – and perhaps, final – presidential debate triggered many. Women and men were triggered. Children had to be removed from living rooms across the nation and put to bed. Cats fled in terror. Dogs growled from the laps of their human caretakers.

The man yelling, interrupting and insulting his opponent was the spitting image of every boor, every lout and every bully any of us has ever known, moulded into a fearsome amalgam. -This composite of the depths of human nature, though, is the President of the USA.

As the week wore on, we recovered from the shock of it. We all knew what he was like. We all understood that there was something fundamentally hinky about this guy but to see it incarnated with such ferocity was an epiphany. It was like witnessing a random act of violence or a terrible pile up on the freeway. Shocking.

But that was last week. This week revealed a whole new level of Hell, a level not even hinted at in the worst moments of the past three years. This week, El Donald went full Mussolini.

Empathy is a beautiful, human quality. It is one of the qualities that crowns our race, like compassion or love. And we hesitated, for a moment, to connect our natural human empathy to the yelling man who’d triggered so many of us with his debate performance, with a sudden COVID diagnosis. We struggled to apply that empathy to El Donald, the POTUS who couldn’t bring himself to denounce white supremacy.

We were told in outraged tones to “be kind” to El Donald, a man who saw fit to mock a differently abled reporter. A man who attacks, threatens, bullies and ridicules anyone who dares to question or criticize him. We were told to put the last four years aside and to wish him only the best.

I confess that I couldn’t do that. I suppose I’m a bit of a lout myself, in that case. But at least I’m not being a lout in the Oval Office.

At least I’m not playing with the minds of the people I’ve been elected to defend and lift up by pretending either that I am very ill or that I am not ill at all. I am not modelling a weird eruption of factitious disorder or – alternatively – I am not pretending that I’m doing just great, even though I have a virus which has killed, to date, 211,000 American citizens. Does anyone know what’s really going on here because I am very, very confused? The air hangs in a fog around us, as we squint into it, hoping for some clarity.

While there was no announcement of Trump’s diagnosis until Friday, October 02, there has been some confusion as to when that diagnosis was arrived at. The White House has been scrambling to integrate messaging, with a variety of claims coming forward concerning the health of POTUS. His symptomatic profile was rolled out in stages. We were told he had a fever.

The POTUS was transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center (under protest and sporting a concealed portable oxygenation device), where he received a single dose of Regeneron – a polyclonal antibody cocktail – as a preventative measure, despite the fact that this medication has not been approved by any regulatory body.  Have the Evangelicals been advised that Regeneron contains stem cells, by the way?

We’re told that he was also dosed with Remdesivir – recently approved by the FDA under an emergency use declaration – and antibody therapy, as well as the steroidal medication, Dexamethasone. These are the facts, but they’re heavily cloaked in the bizarre stagecraft of the Trump White House.

As last weekend drew to a close, El Donald, restless in his confinement, elected to drive by supporters who’d gathered outside Walter Reed. Against the advice of doctors and at the risk of infecting Secret Service staff, he was piled into the standard black SUV and ferried around so that his fans could see how well he was doing. But this Soviet Union-worthy joyride, while Trump was still contagious, wasn’t enough for Our Hero.

Not nearly enough for the phantasmagoric El Donald White House, where lurid spectacle is disguised as the business of the people, no matter how strange. Try to avert your eyes, though. You can’t and neither can I.

Inexplicably and dangerously released from the hospital– if this is not just a massive joke on us all – the next act of this mad Pantomime was to be El Donald’s triumphant return to the White House. On arrival, he mounted a staircase and made it to the top, to everyone’s amazement. Of course, that amazement failed to take into account that El Donald had been prescribed a powerful steroid, Dexamethasone, primarily given to patients critically ill with the virus.

And here’s where I believe we can put to bed speculation about El Donald’s COVID status. This drug, when given to COVID patients on ventilators, has been shown to reduce mortality by one third. That’s powerful. But it’s only given to those requiring oxygenation, so yes. He has it.

In fact, the drug is so powerful, that Dexamethasone may well be the reason that, upon his release from Walter Reed, El Donald tweeted that he felt better than he had “20 years ago”. It may also be the reason that he was able to climb stairs after emerging from a weekend visit to Walter Reed for elite COVID treatment, unavailable to rest of us slobs.

But the icing on the cake came after the feat of stair-climbing strength. El Donald was next to emerge on a White House balcony, dramatically removing his mask from his COVID-infected face. This was his Mussolini moment, as most of us will be familiar with il Duce’s propensity for balcony-based performances.

As the week rolls on, we are told by the ostensible leader of the Free World that COVID is “no worse than the flu”. So, why bother with a stimulus package? I mean, look at El Donald! He’s doing great!

But prominent military Generals at the Pentagon are not doing so great. They’re quarantined, as official after official at the White House is revealed to be infected, including luminaries like Stephen Miller.

And America is certainly not doing great. Not at all. As we look on from the cheap seats, El Donald’s comportment descends into weirdness at a level we have not yet seen. And that’s after four years of bizarre, inexplicable and toxic behavior.

With the presidential election less than a month away, chaos has enveloped the White House. Federal agencies are in disarray, largely led by Acting Secretaries. Pentagon Generals are in quarantine. The White House is awash with COVID and communal dread rises.

Does no one else see that our national security is at stake? Have we lost sight of the fact that a POTUS who is apparently out of touch with reality cannot lead, even for another month? The situation has become critical and a month seems an awfully long time, after what we’ve witnessed over the past week.

I have no idea how any of this will end. My hope is that it will end well. But through the fog rolling over the land, my hope is tentative and the garbage is still sitting there, waiting for someone to take it out.