Fallout From "Bleachgate"

There was no scheduled White House briefing on the COVID-19 crisis yesterday. This followed an abbreviated Friday session in which Donald Trump made only brief remarks and left without taking any questions. And that followed "Bleachgate"- an incredible set of remarks by Trump, where he suggested drinking or injecting disinfectant as a possible treatment for coronavirus.--as well as finding a way to put a bright UV light “inside the body.”  All of  this, when taken together, seem to suggest he may finally have said something so obviously awful that even Trump may feel as sense of embarrassment.

Maybe. . . but it’s clear he's pissed.  There are now reports leaking from the White House that the hunt for someone else to blame is in full swing.

Trump’s first go-to in the search for someone to take the fall went to his standard fall guys, with the current kinda-sorta press secretary Kayleigh McEnany blaming the press for taking Trump  “out of context” while claiming that Trump never tried to give medical advice. The only problem with that is that there was no “context,” as networks were merely playing back his comments in full and unedited-- so no "context" was either added or held back.  In addition, to accept McEnany’s explanation  also requires ignoring the dozens of other times Trump tried to dispense ill-advised medical advice.

Right-wing media, both on Fox News and radio, tried to help out by coming up with the pretense that Trump was talking about some new and radical treatment—something too cool to be known by plain old medical doctors like Deborah Birx or Anthony Fauci.  It's not clear how Fox News talking heads can possibly be privy to brilliant ideas like a Clorox vape.   


Deborah Birx, a physician and the White House coronavirus response coordinator (god bless her soul), even tried to defend the president’s reckless comments, suggesting that they were part of a deliberate, if unorthodox, thought process.  “When he gets new information he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue, and so that’s what dialogue he was having,” Birx said on Fox News Channel.  Nobody's buying that, Deborah-- but keep up the good work on that scarf collection.

 The White House finally seemed to have pinned down a fresh scapegoat for bleachgate. As The Washington Post reported, the tiny Trump finger of blame has now landed on Department of Homeland Security undersecretary William Bryan. And what did Bryan do? He was the one who conducted the private briefing for Trump in which he first addressed for him how UV light and disinfectants were effective in removing coronavirus from surfaces.  Apparently, when giving this information to Trump, Bryan neglected to say that the term "surfaces" doesn’t include the interior of lungs or veins.  You can't make this stuff up.

White House staff who were present at the private briefing seemed to believe at the time that Bryan had too much information in his presentation, and that perhaps the whole thing “was not ready” to go in front of Trump.  Reportedly, even Dr. Fauci seems to have predicted where Trump would run with the information, with worries the presentation might be taken as “the cure for humans.”