By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Honest to goodness I wanted to believe the best about Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as a coronavirus response adviser to Donald John Trump.

I sought to maintain faith that she would give Trump the best advice she could about how to mitigate the damage that the pandemic was bringing to us. I also hoped that she would be forthright in the resistance she was getting from Trump on that advice.

The good doctor dashed my hopes and made my fears come true. Dr. Birx was an enabler of Trump, allowing him to lie to us about the severity of the pandemic and then — in that astonishing televised moment — suggest that we could inject household cleanser into our bodies to kill the virus.

Trump turned to Dr. Birx, as if seeking her approval of what was about to spill from his pie hole. She looked away. Her body language spoke volumes, but we cannot rely wholly on body language; the spoken word is far more valuable.

She remained quiet.

Now we hear from Dr. Birx, a noted epidemiologist who has worked with distinction on AIDS research. She has told about a “very difficult” conversation she had with Trump after an interview she had with CNN about the death count produced by the virus. Trump reportedly threatened her in that phone call. Birx had told CNN that the virus posed a real threat to Americans’ lives. Trump didn’t like what she said.

NBC News reported: “Well, I think you’ve heard other conversations that people have posted with the president,” Birx said as part of a CNN documentary “Covid War: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out,” which is airing in full Sunday evening. “I would say it was even more direct than what people have heard. It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear.”

In this segment, which CNN released Sunday, Birx was asked if she was threatened in the call.

“I would say it was a very uncomfortable conversation,” she said.

Birx recalls ‘very difficult’ call with Trump, says hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths were preventable (nbcnews.com)

This the kind of relationship that the ex-president had with advisers at all levels, in all areas of expertise. He wouldn’t heed their advice and wouldn’t allow them to speak the truth to us out here about what they had learned and what they were telling The Boss.

Birx said also, according to NBC: In an earlier clip released by CNN, Birx said the Trump administration could have prevented hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths had it acted more forcefully to mitigate the pandemic.

“I look at it this way: The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge,” Birx said. “All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

To think, then, that Donald Trump all along kept up the drumbeat of lies, telling us what a “fantastic job” he and his team were doing to fight the pandemic.

Pathetic.