Day 1,191: Trump finally humbled into mostly silence (for one day, at least)

A day after a humiliating coronavirus press briefing, Donald Trump finally took a back seat.

Thursday, Trump suggested UV light and injecting disinfectants as a way to kill the virus.

“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 going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to 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 on the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’ll be interesting to check that. So that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds interesting to me, so we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s pretty powerful.”

Friday, Trump tried to walk back his dangerously idiotic ideas of injectable Clorox and zapping internal organs with UV light as being “sarcastic.”

The problems with Trump’s claim of sarcasm are numerous: 1) watching his comments, he clearly was not being sarcastic; 2) no one was so much as smiling, much less laughing; 3) he wasn’t addressing his question to reporters, but rather government officials next to him; and 4) even if he was being sarcastic — which, again, he obviously wasn’t — there could not be a less appropriate time to crack jokes than when talking about your team’s response to a pandemic killing tens of thousands of Americans.

Even Fox News wasn’t buying Trump’s spin.

Later, at the daily coronavirus press briefing, a chastened Trump — certainly only temporarily — appeared for about 20 minutes. While some briefings last for two hours, Friday’s was quite short. On top of that, Trump took zero questions from reporters, ceding the podium to an official from the FDA and Mike Pence.

For one day, Trump was humiliated into humbleness.

1,191 days in, 271 to go

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