Of all the things I’ve written today, this one sets off my irony meter the hardest. And that’s no small feat — the irony is so dripping wet from Trump these days that you might as well just call it rust-y.

But this one’s ironic for a relatively obscure reason. First, the story: Trump pulled his nomination of  Chad Chronister from consideration for the position as the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Now, I would’ve too, but only because his name is Chad. Chads are fine to be around, but they should never be in charge of anything — not the manager of a McDonald’s, not an advertising team leader, not the President of their HOA. Chads can thank Nickelback for that.

Anyway, Chad Chronister is out, and we hadn’t even heard that he raped someone or shot a puppy or snorted coke off a severed whale head or anything yet. What gives?

It turns out that as Sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, Chronister exercised some extremely non-Republican judgment and actually arrested a fellow Republican who was breaking the law. It happened in March of 2020, still kind of in the thick of the pandemic, when many areas — including Hillsborough County — were still in lockdown for COVID-19.

Lockdown didn’t mean at that time that you couldn’t leave your house or anything. The orders put in place by the President, the Governor of Florida, the CDC, and the Hillsborough County Emergency Policy Group simply limited gatherings to fewer than ten people.

That irritated a lot of folks who are anti-government types and who hadn’t seemed to have learned anything from the fact that there were 8 confirmed deaths at the beginning of March that year, and 4,331 by the end of the same month.

They were mad even though that lockdown order reluctantly came from Donald Trump himself.

Churches refused to comply, and so in March, Sheriff Chronister arrested Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church. He had continued to ignore the lockdown orders and in fact, encouraged parishioners to keep attending in as large a group as they wanted.

Chronister was actually pretty nice about the whole thing. In a statement after the arrest, he said “I believe there is nothing more important than faith at a time like this, and as a Sheriff’s Office, we would never impede on someone’s ability to lean on their religious beliefs as a means of comfort. But practicing those beliefs has to be done safely.”

Besides, Chronister was following orders from President Donald Trump.

So back to the DEA nomination. Chronister publicly stated that he was withdrawing his own name from consideration because of the “gravity” of the “responsibility” of being in charge of the agency. Take a lesson here, Chads: Know your limits.

Donald Trump did not like Chad doing that one bit, and he had a mini-freakout on Truth Social on Wednesday:

The Wall Street Journal is becoming more and more obnoxious and unreadable. Today’s main headline is: “Trump’s DEA Pick Pulls Out In Latest Setback.” With all that’s happening in the World, this is their Number One story of the day. Besides, he didn’t pull out, I pulled him out, because I did not like what he said to my pastors and other supporters.

Now, Trump didn’t say exactly what Chronister had said to “his pastors,” but it’s certainly no coincidence that, since he nominated the Sheriff, some Republican lawmakers had grumbled about Chronister’s actions during the pandemic, and Trump found out about it.

That’s likely what led the Sheriff to take down the official press release from the arrest from his office’s website. It was captured by the web archive prior to removal, though, and in part, said:

“His reckless disregard for human life put hundreds of people in his congregation at risk and thousands of residents who may interact with them this week in danger,” said Sheriff Chronister. “The River at Tampa Bay has an advantage over most places of worship, because they have access to technology that allows them to live stream their services over the internet and broadcast television for the more than 4,000 members to watch from the safety of their homes.”

Pastor Howard-Browne hosted services in his church with hundreds of people at 9:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Sunday and even provided bus transportation to the church.

These were misdemeanor charges — it’s not like Browne even spent any time in jail, other than maybe in holding while his arrest was booked.

So here’s the irony. Never mind that Trump issued the lockdown order himself, and then got mad that somebody followed it when it became clear that it was unpopular among his right-wing loony supporters.

No, the irony is, Trump himself is, aside from any pandemic whatsoever, a total germaphobe. We knew that before the pandemic. Politico reported on it in 2019, calling it “The Purell Presidency,” and I won’t quote at length here or anything, but this is an extremely telling read on Trump’s relationship with sickness and germs.

But he’s so committed to the bit of this right-wing populist candidate who’s absolutely anti-government and fully religious and socially conservative — in opposition to everything we’ve ever known about him before 2016 — that he had to dump a guy he thought was good enough for this job, just because he found out that the guy hadn’t taken his role as a wingnut as seriously as Trump did.

Only he did. He was just following orders.