The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

I don’t want to disparage any people with diagnosed mental illness here, especially those who actually take their meds and work hard to overcome. But I just cannot resist commenting on the latest zany episodes in the crazy Trump reality show presidency.

Every news outlet in the land is reporting on the story about Trump’s longtime physician having his Manhattan office “raided” and all of Trump’s medical files being “seized,” including the New York Times, which may have actually caused Trump to turn on Dr. Harold N. Bornstein by extracting the news in a brief interview in 2017 that Trump was on finasteride, what the Times calls “a prostate-related drug to promote hair growth.”

What is not being reported anywhere I can find are the side effects of this drug, which is sold under the brand names Proscar and Propecia. It is an antiandrogen medication used mainly to treat an enlarged prostate or scalp hair loss in men. But it can also be used to treat excessive hair growth in women and as a part of hormone therapy for transgender women in preparation for a sex change operation.

Wait. What? What is really going on here?

Side effects include erectile dysfunction, which occurs in 45 percent of those who take the drug, according to clinical trials. It can also cause hypoactive sexual desire, a condition that is described to have a 54 percent greater risk of occurrence in those who take the drug. It also increases the risk of certain rare forms of prostate cancer. Some men may also experience sexual dysfunction, depression, anxiety or even breast enlargement.

There has been no testing to see if it enhances or detracts from one’s fetish for golden showers.

Is there any evidence these side effects are having an effect on President Trump? Could this also be the cause of Trump’s constant lies on Twitter?

Would someone with the White House press corps please ask the question? Or I will when I get back to D.C. in June.

While it appears that the doctor’s revelations did run afoul of the Hippocratic oath and violated Trump’s privacy, the raid on his office by Trump’s presidential medical and security staff is now being compared to Watergate on shows such as “The View” on ABC.

NBC News is the news outlet that extracted even more from the doc, conducting an interview in which Bornstein, who served as Trump’s personal doctor for 36 years, said he felt “raped, frightened and sad” after the “raid.”

In trying to cover for Trump, White House press dog Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed: “Those records were being transferred over to the White House Medical Unit, as requested.”

Dr. Bornstein said that he was not given a standard release form conforming to HIPAA regulations to sign over Mr. Trump’s records before they were taken. But Ms. Sanders said that the White House medical unit supplied Dr. Bornstein with a letter requesting the records, presumably after the fact.

According to NBC News medical correspondent Dr. John Torres, if the president’s White House doctor Ronny Jackson was the treating physician, who has problems of his own in the Trump reality show, and he was asking for his patient’s paperwork, a doctor is obligated to give it to him to ensure continuity of care.

“But it has to be given in a secure fashion,” Torres said. “Nobody who doesn’t have HIPAA clearance can see the patient records.”

NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos went even further, saying that patients generally own their medical information, but the original record is the property of the provider.

“New York state law requires that a doctor maintain records for at least six years, so a doctor who hands over his original records runs the risk of violating New York state law,” Cevallos said.

In his initial interviews with the Times in 2017, Dr. Bornstein made no secret of the fact that he had ambitions to be the White House physician, according to the paper’s reporting. That didn’t happen, for reasons that are not clear, although the doctor’s own long hair and appearance could very well be a reason Trump would not pick him for his reality show team.

He certainly met Trump’s loyalty test, however, until the Times interview.

During the presidential campaign, Bornstein wrote two letters vouching for Mr. Trump’s health. In December 2015, he said that Mr. Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” and in September 2016, he said that Mr. Trump was “in excellent physical health.”

As his frustrations appeared to mount on Tuesday, however, Dr. Bornstein told CNN that Mr. Trump had dictated the contents of the first letter himself. So Trump, the executive producer of this reality show, even wrote the script for his doctor?

Then in answering a call from CBS News, Bornstein compared the raid on his office to the Watergate break-in scandal that ultimately brought down President Richard Nixon.

Speaking to a producer for CBS, Bornstein said, “Sweetheart, this is Watergate.”

So will this spell the end of Trump’s reality show presidency, Bornstein’s Watergate?

Will the sex scandal with stripper Stormy Daniels bring the show down and get it taken off the air? It certainly does not appear to belong in prime time, when the kiddies are watching.

Of course there’s also the ongoing criminal probe by special counsel Robert Muller to consider too, which was back in the news this week in the ongoing subplot about whether the president will sit down for an interview under oath or face a subpoena to testify before a grand jury.

Or could Trump really survive all these troubles and scandals and win a Nobel Peace Prize and reelection in 2020?

I mean what are the Democrats doing to prepare for that possibility?

Robert Reich wants to know.

Me too.

As the controversy over the White House correspondents dinner showed this week, the press and media in America have benefited greatly from the Trump reality show presidency with off the charts ratings and boosts in print and digital subscriptions, even though most of the liberals in the elite, mainstream media can’t stand Trump personally and don’t think he is fit to be president.

So the media gave us Trump, now they will just profit from taking him down?

I am being told by journalism professors that Trump is the best thing to happen to newspapers since Watergate. I’m being told by activists that Trump’s the best thing to happen to non-profit environmental groups since Ronald Reagan appointed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior.

Yet clearly he’s the worst thing to happen to the country and the world since George W. Bush.

What’s more important? Profits or the fate of the world? I know what side I’m on. You?