In every one of these instances, Trump paid a price, at least in the short term—multiple corporate bankruptcies and very nearly personal financial ruin. Ultimately, though, he was stalled but not stained—and definitely not stopped. The headlines, no matter what they said, still made him more and more famous. And what often exasperated his staffers and minders and critics in the circles of the social and financial elite also didn’t lose him any fans.

“It’s worked for him,” granted Nobles, the Trump Shuttle president. “You can’t argue with the man’s success.”

The spotlight, after all, led to “The Apprentice,” which led to his turn toward politics, which led to the Oval Office.

He frequently cites his smarts—“Donald Trump’s very, very large brain,” as he once put it. A self-styled expert on topics ranging from technology to the weather to all types of medical matters, Trump is especially attuned, too, to what his base craves. The base wanted hydroxychloroquine from the start. And the base wants it still. And Trump is well aware. “It’s what every pitchman has always done,” former Trump publicist Alan Marcus once told me. “Tell the people what they want to hear.”

“I’ve received a lot of positive letters and it seems to have an impact,” he said Monday in the White House. “And maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t. But if it doesn’t, you’re not going to get sick or die. This is a—a pill that’s been used to a long time—for 30, 40 years on the malaria, and on lupus, too, and even on arthritis, I guess, from what I understand.”

He said he’d been taking it for about a week and half.

“And I’m still here,” he said. “I’m still here.”

Not everybody who’s known him through the years thinks he’s telling the truth.

“Not a chance,” said Res, the former executive vice president. “I don’t think he would subject himself to any potential harm. He wants everyone to think he’s taking it and to think everything he has said all along about it has been right. That’s what he wants. That’s why he’s saying he’s taking it.”

Louise Sunshine, though, another former Trump Organization executive vice president, thinks he is. I asked her why. She’s known Trump for almost 50 years. Because one of his West Wing valets tested positive for the virus, she said. Because the vice president’s spokeswoman tested positive.

“Because,” Sunshine said, “he’s scared.”

“Whether he’s taking it or not,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me Tuesday evening, “I think he has two goals here. One is to distract. And in addition to distraction, he is also a very desperate man who’s trying to control something he can’t control—the coronavirus and its economic effects—and there’s a clock ticking in the back of his mind. And he said in the earliest stages of this that it’ll be like a miracle. It goes away. And so now he’s buying into miracles, and he wants other people to buy into it, too.”

Trump, in O’Brien’s estimation, is taking hydroxochloroquine, or is saying that he is, for the same reason he’s refused so far to wear a mask. “It involves,” O’Brien said, “conceding to expertise.”

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