The President Is a Few Disinfectants Short of a Cleaning Kit
In which the American leader uses his daily briefing during a global pandemic to muse about injecting coronavirus patients with Lysol or bleach.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...nl20106960
By Jack Holmes
Apr 24, 2020
We should probably talk more often about how the president is an insane moron. It was enough that we elected a game-show host with a vocabulary of about 200 words, whose skills do not include "reading" or "paying attention to anything that does not mention him by name for more than a few seconds," in the Before Times.
But now it's a global pandemic, and 50,000 Americans are dead as our country experiences the worst outbreak of anywhere in the world, and we continue to just sit back and watch this guy's wheels spin right off the axles each evening as he turns a "briefing" nominally meant to update the public on the national response into some sort of rally-slash-therapy-session wherein he talks about how great he is and screams at reporters.
The president is not well, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise. He cannot do the job. He never has been capable of it, and not just because he only considers the roughly 40 percent of people who support him—no matter what he does—to be the only real American citizens.
Not just because of his virulent public racism, or the disgusting behavior he continually exhibits towards other human beings who fail to sufficiently praise him. Not just because the shop he runs is almost comically corrupt. At root, beneath the primal nastiness and predatory instinct that has allowed him to survive this long, he simply knows nothing about anything and cares less. He's the kid in class who didn't do the reading. That's part of why we still don't have sufficient testing, a key factor in reopening the economy, and the process of getting masks and protective equipment to states and hospitals remains the Wild West.
On Thursday night, at the daily I'm in Charge But Anything That Goes Wrong Is Not My Fault Briefing, it was all just too clear.
The President inquires about injecting disinfectant? pic.twitter.com/75kGQkD0h7
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) April 23, 2020
This guy is crazy. Straight up. He's nuts.
The President of the United States just addressed the nation and mused about whether we ought to start injecting people with Lysol or Clorox to clean their lungs when they contract a respiratory illness. (Well, at least we thought of it as a respiratory illness. There might be a lot more to it than that, say people who actually study these things and have some grasp of the scientific method.)
If you told your boss you'd come down with something and need a sick day, and he suggested you shoot up some bleach, you'd call the local authorities. Go Keith Richards on some Clorox, says the leader of our nation, who theoretically is tasked with guiding us through a generational cataclysm. I thought it was "millennials" who were eating Tide pods. How long until the president scarfs one down at the podium?
Unfortunately, this is another spasm of the Executive Branch's approach to this pandemic, which is to pass the buck to governors—even if acquiring testing and other supplies requires national coordination, and the president sometimes describes this as a "war" the nation is waging—while The Leader sits around madly touting Miracle Cures.
He also daydreamed about putting sunlight—ultraviolet light(?)—inside people's bodies(?) to kill the virus. He seems to believe what's good for your kitchen counter or the sidewalk is good for your internal organs.
This brought a gallows-hilarious visual response from an onlooking Dr. Deborah Birx. Maybe this is a glimpse into her and Dr. Fauci's lives when they're dealing with this guy behind closed doors.
https://twitter.com/Daniel_Lewis3/status/1253482576699969537
He seems to truly believe that he can will a Miracle Cure into existence, that if he believes it and he can get enough other people to believe it then it really will work—or might as well work. He really is that American archetype, the snake-oil salesman.
Remember hydroxychloroquine? At the time, we cautioned that everybody should wait for people who actually know things to study the anti-malaria drug's effects on COVID-19 patients before we jump on this teetering bandwagon. The president's defenders screamed that anyone suggesting we slow our roll doesn't even want people to get better, and similar claims. Everything is a conspiracy against The Leader.
But now, the largest study yet indicates the drug does not help, and may actually harm. Fox News promoted it over 300 times in 15 days, the president touted it relentlessly, now they act like it never happened.
Meanwhile, the same Presidential Defenders say he never told people to take it, or that it doesn't matter he promoted it because you need a prescription from your doctor. Yes, which is why drug companies never advertise their products to consumers directly. It matters when the President of the United States says something, for Christ's sake. Lysol's manufacturer just had to issue a statement warning people not to inject their product into their veins in response to a presidential proclamation.
Of course there are people who will defend him no matter what, but it's hard not to think that the watching Elite Political Media's refusal to say what is right in front of them has also aided and abetted the madness. Could he have made it this far without people who are so scared of being accused of Bias or not being Objective that they can't bring themselves to call a loon a loon? The latest example comes via The New York Times, which covered the president telling people to inject Lysol intravenously in the following manner:
At a White House briefing, President Trump theorized — dangerously, in the view of some experts — about the powers of sunlight, ultraviolet light and household disinfectants to kill the coronavirus.
That was their tweet. They did not feel they could just say this is dangerous, not to mention fucking crazy. Experts said it. Not us! Again, if a guy walked into the lobby of the New York Times building yelling at people to drink bleach, he would probably be removed from the premises in short order.
But when the president does it, we've got to check in with the experts to know what an 11-year-old knows. Some experts say we are not actually hitting ourselves, but that the president is moving our arms.
In fairness, the actual Times story was delivered with some trademark low-key Times humor. But we need to get a little more direct here. Something really has to give. At what point are you misleading your readers by not pointing out that what just happened was fucking crazy, and they're not crazy to think so? There is a need among some, particularly in Washington, to believe the president is not completely batty.
The prospect that he has no idea what he's doing, and in fact may not be all there, is psychologically difficult for some to grapple with. It's also scary for some folks to think about just saying what's in front of them and feeling the backlash from his supporters. So evening-news programs and newspapers spend a lot of time cleaning up what the president says, pruning the overgrown hedges into something vaguely coherent in their reports.
But he's not going to get better. He's not going to grow into the job or become more "presidential". How many words, realistically, do you really believe he's read about COVID-19? How many pages of briefings?
When are we going to demand more than a circus from the people in whom we now have so much of our futures invested, willingly or not? We should be calling for this guy to resign on a daily basis. He should be impeached again for gross incompetence. Mike Pence looks like fucking FDR by comparison.
Most of the president's supporters will never hold him to any standard that he might not meet. In fact, they will continually lower the bar to accommodate him, because they have already invested too much of themselves in this to go back.
The sunk cost is too high. It's up to everyone else to plainly say that he should not have this job any longer. We hired him, on a temporary basis, to manage the Executive Branch of our government. He should be fired.
In which the American leader uses his daily briefing during a global pandemic to muse about injecting coronavirus patients with Lysol or bleach.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...nl20106960
By Jack Holmes
Apr 24, 2020
We should probably talk more often about how the president is an insane moron. It was enough that we elected a game-show host with a vocabulary of about 200 words, whose skills do not include "reading" or "paying attention to anything that does not mention him by name for more than a few seconds," in the Before Times.
But now it's a global pandemic, and 50,000 Americans are dead as our country experiences the worst outbreak of anywhere in the world, and we continue to just sit back and watch this guy's wheels spin right off the axles each evening as he turns a "briefing" nominally meant to update the public on the national response into some sort of rally-slash-therapy-session wherein he talks about how great he is and screams at reporters.
The president is not well, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise. He cannot do the job. He never has been capable of it, and not just because he only considers the roughly 40 percent of people who support him—no matter what he does—to be the only real American citizens.
Not just because of his virulent public racism, or the disgusting behavior he continually exhibits towards other human beings who fail to sufficiently praise him. Not just because the shop he runs is almost comically corrupt. At root, beneath the primal nastiness and predatory instinct that has allowed him to survive this long, he simply knows nothing about anything and cares less. He's the kid in class who didn't do the reading. That's part of why we still don't have sufficient testing, a key factor in reopening the economy, and the process of getting masks and protective equipment to states and hospitals remains the Wild West.
On Thursday night, at the daily I'm in Charge But Anything That Goes Wrong Is Not My Fault Briefing, it was all just too clear.
The President inquires about injecting disinfectant? pic.twitter.com/75kGQkD0h7
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) April 23, 2020
This guy is crazy. Straight up. He's nuts.
The President of the United States just addressed the nation and mused about whether we ought to start injecting people with Lysol or Clorox to clean their lungs when they contract a respiratory illness. (Well, at least we thought of it as a respiratory illness. There might be a lot more to it than that, say people who actually study these things and have some grasp of the scientific method.)
If you told your boss you'd come down with something and need a sick day, and he suggested you shoot up some bleach, you'd call the local authorities. Go Keith Richards on some Clorox, says the leader of our nation, who theoretically is tasked with guiding us through a generational cataclysm. I thought it was "millennials" who were eating Tide pods. How long until the president scarfs one down at the podium?
Unfortunately, this is another spasm of the Executive Branch's approach to this pandemic, which is to pass the buck to governors—even if acquiring testing and other supplies requires national coordination, and the president sometimes describes this as a "war" the nation is waging—while The Leader sits around madly touting Miracle Cures.
He also daydreamed about putting sunlight—ultraviolet light(?)—inside people's bodies(?) to kill the virus. He seems to believe what's good for your kitchen counter or the sidewalk is good for your internal organs.
This brought a gallows-hilarious visual response from an onlooking Dr. Deborah Birx. Maybe this is a glimpse into her and Dr. Fauci's lives when they're dealing with this guy behind closed doors.
https://twitter.com/Daniel_Lewis3/status/1253482576699969537
He seems to truly believe that he can will a Miracle Cure into existence, that if he believes it and he can get enough other people to believe it then it really will work—or might as well work. He really is that American archetype, the snake-oil salesman.
Remember hydroxychloroquine? At the time, we cautioned that everybody should wait for people who actually know things to study the anti-malaria drug's effects on COVID-19 patients before we jump on this teetering bandwagon. The president's defenders screamed that anyone suggesting we slow our roll doesn't even want people to get better, and similar claims. Everything is a conspiracy against The Leader.
But now, the largest study yet indicates the drug does not help, and may actually harm. Fox News promoted it over 300 times in 15 days, the president touted it relentlessly, now they act like it never happened.
Meanwhile, the same Presidential Defenders say he never told people to take it, or that it doesn't matter he promoted it because you need a prescription from your doctor. Yes, which is why drug companies never advertise their products to consumers directly. It matters when the President of the United States says something, for Christ's sake. Lysol's manufacturer just had to issue a statement warning people not to inject their product into their veins in response to a presidential proclamation.
Of course there are people who will defend him no matter what, but it's hard not to think that the watching Elite Political Media's refusal to say what is right in front of them has also aided and abetted the madness. Could he have made it this far without people who are so scared of being accused of Bias or not being Objective that they can't bring themselves to call a loon a loon? The latest example comes via The New York Times, which covered the president telling people to inject Lysol intravenously in the following manner:
At a White House briefing, President Trump theorized — dangerously, in the view of some experts — about the powers of sunlight, ultraviolet light and household disinfectants to kill the coronavirus.
That was their tweet. They did not feel they could just say this is dangerous, not to mention fucking crazy. Experts said it. Not us! Again, if a guy walked into the lobby of the New York Times building yelling at people to drink bleach, he would probably be removed from the premises in short order.
But when the president does it, we've got to check in with the experts to know what an 11-year-old knows. Some experts say we are not actually hitting ourselves, but that the president is moving our arms.
In fairness, the actual Times story was delivered with some trademark low-key Times humor. But we need to get a little more direct here. Something really has to give. At what point are you misleading your readers by not pointing out that what just happened was fucking crazy, and they're not crazy to think so? There is a need among some, particularly in Washington, to believe the president is not completely batty.
The prospect that he has no idea what he's doing, and in fact may not be all there, is psychologically difficult for some to grapple with. It's also scary for some folks to think about just saying what's in front of them and feeling the backlash from his supporters. So evening-news programs and newspapers spend a lot of time cleaning up what the president says, pruning the overgrown hedges into something vaguely coherent in their reports.
But he's not going to get better. He's not going to grow into the job or become more "presidential". How many words, realistically, do you really believe he's read about COVID-19? How many pages of briefings?
When are we going to demand more than a circus from the people in whom we now have so much of our futures invested, willingly or not? We should be calling for this guy to resign on a daily basis. He should be impeached again for gross incompetence. Mike Pence looks like fucking FDR by comparison.
Most of the president's supporters will never hold him to any standard that he might not meet. In fact, they will continually lower the bar to accommodate him, because they have already invested too much of themselves in this to go back.
The sunk cost is too high. It's up to everyone else to plainly say that he should not have this job any longer. We hired him, on a temporary basis, to manage the Executive Branch of our government. He should be fired.
