Trump Goes Peak Batshit Crazy, Urging UV Irradiation and Chlorine Injections, and Cable TV Greedily Broadcasts It

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

24 April 20

eff Zucker, the CEO of the Cable News Network, has a Harvard B.A. in American History and his father is a cardiologist, so he definitely knows better. So too does Steve Burke, the CEO of Comcast / NBC Universal. Suzanne Scott at Fox Fable News probably doesn’t know better, but that is no excuse.

The cable news media continues to broadcast Daffy Donald’s Parlous Snake Oil Show every night unfiltered and to let him say the most damaging things. When CNN pulled back briefly, Trump denied them high visibility guests like Dr. Anthony Fauci until they folded. But Fauci has lots of peers in the US medical community; put them on instead. The cable networks pimp Trump out for ratings, since advertising rates are tied to ratings. Like alien ravagers in a sci-fi B movie, they are willing to leave the country a burned-out post-apocalyptic hulk for the sake of their corporate profits. They’ve even pretty much stopped reporting any actual news at all, since that wouldn’t support the selling of tampons and toilet paper.

First the Daffy One pushed hydrochloroquine, which is implicated in heart problems, for coronavirus in the absence of a big clinical study. Whether he was talking up the stock of Novartis, the manufacturer, and how much of that stock he or his cronies own, is something that perhaps only future historians will know, given how successful Trump has been in covering up his various crimes. But that advocacy was merely dangerous and reckless because premature and unfounded, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

But then on Thursday, Daffy Donald floated off into the vast Empyrean of infinite daffiness:

“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.”

“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 [the coronavirus] gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors, right? But it sounds, it sounds interesting to me.” 

[I originally embedded this clip from The Guardian but they thought it so toxic they took it down. It was just a clip. We are to the point where responsible journalists have second thoughts about broadcasting the president without contextualizing, as this Bloomberg short does.]

I’ve spent my scholarly life analyzing texts, and I think these weighty passages need parsing. Daffy Donald, it seems, wishes to cure the coronavirus by shining light on the body. He appears to think that simple white light might have a curative effect. But he is willing to entertain the possibility that stronger medicine, in the form of ultraviolet rays, might be necessary. 

Shining the light onto the outside of the body, however, he believes, might be inadequate — since that is usually known in layman’s terms as “sunbathing.” No, a measure more effective than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s West Palm Beach Cure might just be desirable. Especially since DeSantis, a notorious white supremacist, has mixed feelings about turning white people brown, but also because he mainly is spreading the elder-killing coronavirus around a state with old folks’ homes stacked every which way from Sunday.

So Trump admits that it might (we have to look into this) be possible or desirable or both to bring the light inside the body. 

As Professor Trump knows, when photons encounter a dense array of atoms with strong electron fields around them (such as a human body) they interact with the electrons, which absorb their energy. In other words they can’t get through ordinary matter, such as a human body. Photons can in some sense get through glass, because they don’t much excite the electrons of those atoms, which have big band gaps. But UV rays can’t get through most window panes, and they also can’t get much past a person’s outer skin.

So clearly the solution is to make the human body more like glass, i.e., endow it with bigger band gaps between electron fields. The body needs to be translucent. Who would know how to do that? Daffy Donald may want to speak on the subject with Kevin Bacon, who starred in the 2000 film “Hollow Man.” Trump may not know Mr. Bacon, but he likely knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows him.

A further challenge is making photons kill viruses once they have penetrated the translucent body, since they have never been known to do so. 

As for UV rays, there are three types. Ordinary UVA rays are what reach us from the sun. UVB rays also reach us from the sun but are nastier and give you sunburn and skin cancer. They will much shorten the life of a virus, but if an infected person sneezes on you at the beach you’ll still fall ill. Otherwise there would be no cases in India. Have you been to India in April? UVC has a shorter wavelength, and it will kill viruses on surfaces. However, you really wouldn’t want to irradiate people with it unless you were trying to turn them into a mass of bulbous tumors or simply to fry them to a crisp. 

Moreover, even exposure to a lot of ordinary UV rays weakens a person’s immunity, which is, like, undesirable during a pandemic.

As for injecting disinfectants (ethanol, bleach or hydrogen peroxide) into your bloodstream, this will kill you dead. Ordinarily the English teacher in me would object to the redundancy of this last phrase. In this instance, however, it simply describes the actual consequences. You will have been killed, and you will be quite dead. Very much like the Monty Python parrot. You will be deceased, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, gone to see your maker, bereft of life, resting in peace, joined the choir invisible, an ex-human.

Since the novel coronavirus only has a 2% or so chance of killing you, the 100% chance of dying by bleach needle needs to be weighed in the balance. Personally, I’ve decided against it. Those who trust Trump implicitly to be in charge of our nation’s nuclear weapons, national security, economic well-being and public health safety may go in a different direction. A nether direction. 

The psychology of these two passages points to an interpenetration of some outside force or agent (sun rays, bleach) with the body in order to wipe out another interloper. Trump has clearly lost a sense of body boundaries, which is typical of some mental disorders. I’m not qualified to pronounce Trump technically insane. He may be at some extreme edge on the spectrum of psychiatric normality for all I know. However, I can confidently conclude that that outer edge he occupies is beyond what is acceptable to me in a man with his finger on the nuclear button.

So I’m calling bullshit on the entire US government apparatus and the entire cable news apparatus. They go on pretending we don’t have a public health crisis in this country directly stemming from having a president who is, in layman’s terms, off his freaking rocker. He is giving medical advice that will be sure to kill anyone who takes it.

Comcast, Time Warner and Fox Corp. are each worth billions. They don’t need to eke out a few more pennies by putting Trump on Americans’ screens unfiltered. It is not enough for overpaid telejournalists to raise their eyebrows and plead gently with the public not to pay attention to the deranged narcissist they have just inflicted on that very public. This degree of journalistic malfeasance is now a form of attempted manslaughter.

The Casualties of a 'Wartime Presidency'

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

24 April 20

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Brian Kemp’s plan to reopen Georgia’s economy, and the removal of a federal vaccine scientist.

espite pushback from public health experts, local employers, mayors, and even Fox News, Georgia governor Brian Kemp has announced that some businesses in his state will begin to reopen tomorrow, and Tennessee, Ohio, and South Carolina will follow soon after. What’s the benefit to a governor like Kemp in making this decision now?

Having stolen an election from Stacey Abrams by disenfranchising black voters, Kemp clearly believes he can get away with anything. The only certain beneficiaries of his edict will be the owners and employees of funeral homes. Even before tomorrow’s reopening, Georgia ranks second in deaths per capita, behind Louisiana, among the thirteen states of the South. It ranks 40th among the states per capita in coronavirus testing. While federal guidelines ask that states achieve a sustained two-week decline in infections before lifting any restrictions, Georgia is doing so with infections on the rise. Then again, no one ever said its governor was a brain surgeon, or even functionally literate. By Kemp’s own account, it took him until April Fool’s Day to learn that asymptomatic Covid-19 carriers could spread the disease – information that had been publicly known since January.

It must have been shocking for a MAGA panderer like Kemp to be bitch-slapped by Trump, who unexpectedly declared at yesterday’s press conference that Georgia was reopening “too soon” and that he “strongly disagrees” with such a plan. This was a curious move by a president who had previously called for the entire country to reopen by May 1 and wielded tweets inciting states to “liberate” themselves at once from Covid-19 protections. What happened? Perhaps members of the coronavirus task force implored Trump at the last minute that Georgia might be on track to face its fiercest devastation since the burning of Atlanta. We know this is one American historical landmark that Trump has heard of because he’s on record expressing his enthusiasm for Gone with the Wind. 

The president’s favored medical tool, Dr. Deborah Birx, publicly keeps to the old script. Earlier this week, she refused to condemn Georgia for reopening nail spas, tattoo emporia, and massage parlors on the grounds that its citizens could be “very creative” in achieving social distancing in such venues. This is only the latest example of Birx debasing herself in deference to her dear leader, prioritizing his favor over public health. She first revealed her hand at one of the earliest Trump press briefings when she displayed an elaborate graphic to promote a Google site that would facilitate national coronavirus testing. The Google site didn’t exist, and neither did the testing, but Dr. Birx to this day has neither apologized for nor explained a public-relations stunt that led to more unnecessary deaths. When this “wartime presidency” is finally over, she deserves at least a cameo in any war crimes prosecutions.

Of the politicians and public officials pushing or countenancing immediate reopenings, Kemp and Birx may not be the most egregious. In Oklahoma, there’s Carol Hefner, a co-chair of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, who told the Times that because her state gets “a lot of wind” and is topographically flat, it is “in a much better position than many of the other states to go ahead and open back up.” Surely the Flat Earth Society has never had a better spokesperson. In Texas, there’s the always reliable lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, whose argument for back-to-business-as-usual is that “there are more important things than living.” Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, achieved instant notoriety when she told Anderson Cooper this week that she is eager to reopen the casinos and roll the dice on whatever happens next because “we would love to be” the “placebo” for national coronavirus testing. “I’d love everything open,” she explained, “because I think we’ve had viruses for years that have been here.” She’s not wrong: Nevada ranks fifth per capita in HIV infections.

At a time when factory towns across the Midwest are suffering devastation comparable to that of the pandemic’s coastal urban epicenters, at least one prominent Republican is speaking out unequivocally against premature reopenings: Jay Timmons, who, as head of the National Association of Manufacturers, is one of the leading manufacturing lobbyists in Washington. Timmons was for a dozen years the chief of staff to the very conservative former Virginia governor and senator George Allen; in 2004 he was executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This week, as demonstrators in Charlottesville-esque regalia marched on the Virginia governor’s mansion in Richmond pleading for “liberation,” he’d had enough. He began his Facebook post castigating the protestors with a single word, all in caps: IDIOTS. As Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post has observed, the latest incarnation of the Tea Party movement, once again underwritten by deep-pocketed right-wing donors, is rallying under the slogan “Give me liberty and give me death!”

The head of the government agency involved with federal efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine was unexpectedly removed from his post for, he says, resisting the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and he has requested a federal investigation. Will his going public push what he’s called the “cronyism” out of the federal public-health response?

Not on your life – or perhaps I should say not on all our lives. We know there is only one criterion for serving as a scientist in this administration – fealty to the boss. The fact that Dr. Rick Bright was in charge of arguably the single most important mission in public health right now, developing a Covid-19 vaccine that could shut down the pandemic, didn’t matter to Trump. Indeed, Bright mattered so little to Trump that when asked about his removal, he responded “I never heard of him.”

What Trump surely had heard is that Bright, like every other scientist and doctor in the land, pushed for clinical tests to determine the safety and efficacy of drugs that the president had told Americans to take because, as he put it, “What do you have to lose?” One of those drugs, we now know, led to higher loss of life for those who took them in hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. But Trump doesn’t care about that; he only cares that Bright, unlike, say, Dr. Birx, favored scientific empiricism over the president’s gut “feeling” about prescription medications.

Bright’s reference to “cronyism,” in his searing statement protesting his removal, no doubt refers to the likes of the Oracle tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the U.S. trade adviser Peter Navarro, and the Fox News “personality” Laura Ingraham, all of whom have been reported to have lobbied Trump to promote the drug. They, like Trump, now have blood, including veterans’ blood, on their hands. So do all the others who used their power to push this snake oil on vulnerable Americans, including Rush Limbaugh and Ingraham’s colleagues at Fox. The network is already facing a class-action lawsuit for its dissemination of lethal misinformation during a pandemic.

With Bright gone, it’s only a matter of time before he’s followed out the door by Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC head, who made the mistake of saying in an interview what nearly every other leading public-health expert has asserted: There is likely to be a second and worse wave of Covid-19 this fall, coinciding with flu (and election) season. In Trump’s version of a public show trial, he demanded during yesterday’s press circus that Redfield eat his words. Redfield took the podium and tried to dance around this presidential order, but surely not enough for his boss’s taste. Anthony Fauci soon seconded what Redfield had originally said about the second wave.

With Bright out of action and Redfield and eventually Fauci on the ropes, you might ask what kind of people the Trump administration wants in jobs that could have life-or-death implications for Americans. One answer was reported by Reuters last night. It turns out that the man originally put in charge of the administration’s daily response to Covid-19 by Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the original head of the White House’s coronavirus task force, was a crony, Brian Harrison, who for six years had run a dog-breeding business called Dallas Labradoodles. Could the Trump administration field anyone more useless? Even though we are now learning that household pets can be infected by the virus, the known victims aren’t dogs but cats.