The president says he was being sarcastic when he suggested during a White House coronavirus briefing that people should consider injecting bleach and consuming disinfectants as cure for COVID-19.
He was not being sarcastic.
He was being completely fucking nuts.
We should expect more shockers like this as things get worse inside his deranged brain.
From the Daily Beast:
Inside the West Wing, it was clear that the president's talk of studying bizarre injections was not something that Trump had put a whole lot of thought into, nor did it seem like something he'd spent much time dwelling on privately before blurting it out.
Four senior administration officials and two sources close to the president each said on Friday that they had not previously heard Trump ever bring up disinfectant injections as something scientists should test as a coronavirus treatment. All were dumbfounded by what he had said during the televised briefing. Several official Trump surrogates reached by The Daily Beast on Friday morning had zero appetite to defend the president's remarks, and were simply waiting for this bit of inconvenient news to slip out of the cable-news cycle.
"I was just sitting there watching it [live] and thinking to myself, 'I guess this is going to be the thing tomorrow,'" said one of the administration officials.
In the halls of the White House, top aides went into a very familiar damage-control mode. A former senior White House official noted that in the West Wing, Trump's lieutenants have a very simple standard operating procedure for when the president "says something dumb that he probably should not have said": just claim he was taken out of context or misinterpreted, insist that his underlying point was valid or good, and then go on the offense, usually by complaining about mainstream-media outlets treating Trump unfairly or obsessing over insignificant detail.
"4 senior administration officials & 2 sources close to the president said on Friday that they were dumbfounded" by Trump's bleach-injection talk. They had "zero appetite to defend the president's remarks." https://t.co/0NJ6XWn5KK
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) April 24, 2020
"I was just sitting there watching it [live] and thinking to myself, 'I guess this is going to be the thing tomorrow,'" one of the administration officials told @swin24.
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) April 24, 2020
We decided to take the step of posting this alert after receiving more than 100 calls to our hotline.
— Mike Ricci (@riccimike) April 24, 2020
Read more at the Daily Beast:
When Trump Suggested Injecting Oneself With Disinfectant People Took Him Literally
[Will Sommer, Asawin Suebsaeng, Adam Rawnsley]
Previously at Boing Boing:
• Bleach and cocaine do not a coronavirus cure make
• Trump suggests ingesting disinfectant to cure coronavirus (Don't, it'll kill you)
