The conventional view is that President Trump is having a bad war. Eccentricities that seemed tolerable, even entertaining, when times were good now make voters wince with impatience. Even if we write off his bleach-drinking advice as an example of his childlike stream-of-consciousness discourse, the president’s advocacy of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, as the evidence against its usefulness piles up, is unworthy.

It might make sense to push a sluggish healthcare bureaucracy to think outside the box, but Trump’s tone when he announced that he was still taking the drug was that of a peevish toddler saying, “Well, you can’t stop me, so there!”