Trump latest: ignore the US president, do not inject bleach

It has long been known that Donald Trump is driven to distraction by the TV. Forget intelligence briefings or political advisers, it’s the views of the TV commentariat that drives the President’s daily agenda. Much as he derides the media, he is obsessed by the media.

According to a New York Times report this week, “He has been up in the White House master bedroom as early as 5 a.m. watching Fox News, then CNN, with a dollop of MSNBC thrown in for rage viewing. He makes calls with the TV on in the background, his routine since he first arrived at the White House.”

On Tuesday, some of that rage spilt out into public. Trump tweeted about his former friends, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who host the show, “Morning Joe”, on MSNBC (though Trump calls it “MSDNC”).

Watched the first 5 minutes of poorly rated Morning Psycho on MSDNC just to see if he is as “nuts” as people are saying. He’s worse. Such hatred and contempt! I used to do his show all the time before the 2016 election, then cut him off. Wasn’t worth the effort, his mind is shot!

It would be an astonishing tweet if we weren’t already numb to this President’s behaviour. Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Florida who epitomises old Republican values of fiscal responsibility and small government. He is married to Brzezinski, herself part of a US political dynasty, being the daughter of the hugely respected diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter.

Some credit Trump’s success to the couple, who repeatedly interviewed the reality star and gave him the political respectability he was lacking pre-2016. Such was his former affection towards them, Trump had offered to marry the couple – in the end, they wed last year without Trump’s help.

But that all changed once Trump attained the White House. The show turned critical of the President, leading Trump to write some particularly unpleasant tweets about the couple in 2017, calling Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” who he claimed to have seen “bleeding badly from a face-lift”.

Despite his animus, Trump apparently watches the first hour of their show every day. It’s perhaps why for that first hour, the show styles itself as an address to the President. Scarborough rails at the decisions that Trump has made the previous day. In recent weeks, the theme has almost entirely been coronavirus and some key points have been made again and again and again. Chief among them (and here is the crucial detail): Trump’s claim that the coronavirus would disappear with the warmer weather.

All that is prologue. What comes next is (sigh) the worst press briefing of Trump’s presidency.

Forgive the hyperbole when we all know that *every* briefing feels like it’s the worst of this presidency. Trump has been using these briefings to push all manner of medical advice, both sensible and quackery. He has been particularly enthusiastic about promoting the lupus and malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible remedy for COVID-19.

At least one death followed after a couple ingested pool cleaner thinking they were following the President’s advice. A recent study from the VA also concluded that not only is the drug ineffective but that more patients died after taking the drug than those that were treated normally.

Last night, the theme of the conference was again science. Space was made at the podium for William Bryan, the Acting Under Secretary for Science & Technology at the Department of Homeland Security, who gave a rather pointed lecture on the efficiency of sunlight in killing the coronavirus.

“Very interesting,” said the President, resuming the podium, as if it wasn’t transparently obvious what the previous lecture had been about. This had been a crude attempt to set the record straight. No longer would people like Mika and Joe be able to point at Trump and say he doesn’t know what he was talking about. Light and heat do kill the virus! And if he had left it there, he might have made his point, won the game with the scores settled.

Except, of course, Trump can hardly ever leave a fight when he’s winning…

“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous… whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light… and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re gonna test it, and then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re gonna test that too… Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute and… is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number of … so it’d be interesting to check that.”

It’s worth quoting it in full because you might only glimpse pieces of this remarkable oration on social media today amid all the jokes about Domestos and Cillit Bang. What’s easy to overlook, however, is how he followed it up.

“I once mentioned that maybe it does go away with heat and light and people didn’t like that statement. The fake news didn’t like it at all, and I just threw it out as a suggestion, but it seems like that’s the case.”

The latter explains the former. “Hey!” he might as well have shouted. “Don’t mock my science. I was right about the heat, wasn’t I?”

Yet the damage was done. A briefing meant to neutralise one weakness had produced something profoundly worse. The President’s words were epoch-defining stupidity, a once-in-generation level of buffoonery, asswittery that deserves etching on a rock somewhere. A president of the United States had just speculated, aloud, in front of cameras, to the American people, whether they could be injected with disinfectant or have a light inserted into their bodies to end a pandemic.

And just to make clear: these ideas might sound crazy but not for what they explicitly say. Trump is right in that UV light does kill viruses, while disinfectants, usually containing chlorine, have been used to clean wounds since the First World War. Trump knows much of that because that’s what Under Secretary Bryan’s presentation had just told him.

What’s worrying is the *absence* of knowledge that these remarks demonstrate. Does he not know that UV light also damages our cells and is carcinogenic, or that bottles of bleach warn about the dangers of ingestion for good reason?

It is appalling that these things need stating, yet here in 2020, they must. What’s more, this isn’t the kind of mistake that will disappear with the heat. Nor will it evaporate with the summer or even another briefing and another expert marched out to set the matter straight. This is the kind of mistake that will hound Donald Trump until November and then pursue him on through time.

Washington. The guy with the cherry tree.

Lincoln. That speech at Gettysburg.

Trump? Oh, wasn’t he the president who suggested we might drink bleach to cleanse our insides?