“…you wonder how we got to the point where you’re talking about injecting disinfectant.”
At 50,000 dead, Trump may have reached the season finale of the daily COVID Taskforce briefing show and dinner theater. There will be clip shows and re-runs until November, and treachery, even more treachery.
Axios reporter Jonathan Swan reported that Trump plans to scale back the number and length of the briefings going forward, apparently having learned that they don’t showcase him at his best. The report even suggested that the disinfectant remark might have been the trigger for Trump’s decision:
President Trump plans to pare back his coronavirus press conferences, according to four sources familiar with the internal deliberations. He may stop appearing daily and make shorter appearances when he does, the sources said — a practice that may have started with Friday’s unusually short briefing.
…
Another source close to the deliberations said there simply isn’t enough new material to justify Trump appearing before the press every day. “I mean, you wonder how we got to the point where you’re talking about injecting disinfectant?” the source wondered aloud.
The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week.
In his letter, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”.
Grenon styles himself as “archbishop” of Genesis II – a Florida-based outfit that claims to be a church but which in fact is the largest producer and distributor of chlorine dioxide bleach as a “miracle cure” in the US. He brands the chemical as MMS, “miracle mineral solution”, and claims fraudulently that it can cure 99% of all illnesses including cancer, malaria, HIV/Aids as well as autism. Since the start of the pandemic, Genesis II has been marketing MMS as a cure to coronavirus. It advises users, including children, to mix three to six drops of bleach in water and drink it.
A few days after Grenon dispatched his letter, Trump went on national TV at his daily coronavirus briefing at the White House on Thursday and promoted the idea that disinfectant could be used as a treatment for the virus. To the astonishment of medical experts, the US president said that disinfectant “knocks it out in a minute. One minute!”
He went on to say: “Is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.”
[….]
In his weekly televised radio show, posted online on Sunday, Grenon read out the letter he wrote to Trump. He said it began: “Dear Mr President, I am praying you read this letter and intervene.”
Grenon said that 30 of his supporters have also written in the past few days to Trump at the White House urging him to take action to protect Genesis II in its bleach-peddling activities which they claim can cure coronavirus.
In the midst of the Great Recession in 2009, he began hawking a rapid-results weight-loss and nutrition program as part of a pyramid-like company called the Trump Network. And the venture flopped. The Trump Network was a multi-level marketing company that recruited regular people to act as salesmen for its products (usually some kind of nutrition supplement) and saddled them with the losses if they couldn’t find buyers. The Federal Trade Commission received numerous complaints from people who claimed the Trump Network had taken advantage of them. “They are scamming and deceiving people, making them believe that if they ‘just hang in there’ they will make money,” one person wrote. (The FTC never took action against the company.) As with many Trump business deals, Trump had licensed his name and endorsement to an existing company called Ideal Health, which rebranded itself with his name and logo when he signed on. Although he took no leadership role in the company, he enthusiastically endorsed its products, and his name—and promises of riches at a time of economic malaise—were central to its appeal. www.motherjones.com/…
For the first time, Trump and his team left the briefing and refused to take questions from reporters.
He is too afraid to be asked again about his insane comments from yesterday.
Trump is owned. 15 times he praised the Chinese response and told the American people there was nothing to worry about. He was looking to save face in his backfiring, farm killing trade war. Corrupt doesn’t even begin to describe it all. MAGA =50,000 dead and a shattered economy. https://t.co/Gc73OuDp9C
I could be wrong, but somehow the Lysol moment feels like it could be a psychological turning point — the moment when even a lot of Trump diehards face up to his essential unfitness 1/
Those who went through the Bush years may remember how scandal after scandal, policy failure after policy failure, didn’t seem to stick. The debacle in Iraq dented Bush’s popularity, but not nearly as much as it should have 2/
But Katrina somehow was the defining moment. Some of us had long understood Bush’s inadequacy, but “Heckuva job, Brownie” as scenes of devastation played on TV broke through the denial 3/
And I have the feeling — which is all that it is — that suggesting that people inject themselves with disinfectant may in its own way be the comparable moment, when even the true believers run out of excuses 4/
Of course I could be wrong. But right now my sense is that, to turn the pundit cliche on its head, yesterday was the day Trump stopped being president 5/
WASHINGTON (CN) — During the 1918 pandemic, quack doctors and con men prescribed consuming kerosene — dispensed atop a lump of sugar, of course — to ward off influenza. @CourthouseNews @BBuchman_CNS https://t.co/yEdv0qTHmI
