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What Trump Risks By Fatmouthing

It's not only his own presidency -- it's also GOP control of the Senate
The White House Holds Daily Briefing On Coronavirus Pandemic

Here is the transcript of President Trump’s controversial remarks about disinfectants and potential coronavirus treatments:

“So I asked Bill a question some of you are thinking of if you’re into that world, which I find to be pretty interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn’t been checked but you’re gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you’re gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by 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. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me, so we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it goes in one minute, that’s pretty powerful.”

No, Trump did not tell people to vape Lysol. What he did was that thing he always does, which is to open his mouth and let his brains run out. This is relatively harmless stuff when your elderly mother calls you to say she saw somebody on Facebook talking about bleach miracle cures, and wouldn’t that be interesting if it really worked. It’s something else when the president of the United States babbles on about it in a press briefing. Pope Francis has this habit too, of just talking off the cuff, and forgetting that when you’re the Holy Roman Pontiff, you can’t just say whatever comes to mind in any given moment. He seems to have gotten better about that, but Trump hasn’t.

As a practical political matter, when you are reduced to defending the president by saying that he didn’t literally tell people to ingest disinfectant, you’re losing. People are angry, they’re tired of the lockdown, they’re scared of the future, and the last thing we need is a president who stands there like Cliff Clavin at the bar in Cheers, fatmouthing about whatever fool thing crosses his mind. The garrulous Trump has always lacked discipline, but that fault is really hurting him now, in this crisis. Of course the media can’t stand him, but he goes out of his way to provide his enemies with material.

After he caught grief for his disinfectant and UV light remarks, he said that he was actually being “sarcastic.” Right. Tell us another one, Mr. President.

If Trump wants to blow up his own political career, fine by me — I won’t miss him when he’s gone. But he’s threatening to take Republican control of the Senate with him. From the NYT:

President Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Mr. Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course.

The scale of the G.O.P.’s challenge has crystallized in the last week. With 26 million Americans now having filed for unemployment benefits, Mr. Trump’s standing in states that he carried in 2016 looks increasingly wobbly: New surveys show him trailing significantly in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he is even narrowly behind in must-win Florida.

More:

Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Trump’s single best advantage as an incumbent — his access to the bully pulpit — has effectively become a platform for self-sabotage.

His daily news briefings on the coronavirus outbreak are inflicting grave damage on his political standing, Republicans believe, and his recent remarks about combating the virus with sunlight and disinfectant were a breaking point for a number of senior party officials.

Of course they were, because these senior party officials live in the real world, and they know that with the economy in collapse, the American people have little patience for this juvenile stupidity. Here’s the key part of the story:

The surveys also showed Republican senators in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Maine trailing or locked in a dead heat with potential Democratic rivals — in part because their fate is linked to Mr. Trump’s job performance. If incumbents in those states lose, and Republicans pick up only the Senate seat in Alabama, Democrats would take control of the chamber should Mr. Biden win the presidency.

“He’s got to run very close for us to keep the Senate,” Charles R. Black Jr., a veteran Republican consultant, said of Mr. Trump. “I’ve always thought we were favored to, but I can’t say that now with all these cards up in the air.”

Read the whole thing, especially the granular data. The Democrats already hold the House, and that’s not expected to change. If they capture the White House and the Senate, the things that social conservative voters care most about — abortion, religious liberty, SOGI laws — will be in dire trouble. Forget the judiciary: Democrats will be able to name and confirm federal judges without much trouble, and will be able to see Justices Ginsburg and Breyer off to their long-anticipated retirements, confident that they will be able to install two strong liberals.

Things could change a lot between now and November, obviously, but Trump and his party are going to have to defend the White House in the face of the greatest economic calamity the nation has seen since the Great Depression. He cannot take anything for granted. Handing the future of the courts over to the Democrats — that’s one big thing Trump is putting at risk with his big fat mouth. Nobody is forcing him to come down and spend an hour or two daily sharing his Deep Thoughts with the country. What Trump reveals in these depressing exercises is how unfit he is to run the country in this crisis. To be fair to him, many leaders around the world, including those not saddled with Trump’s indiscipline and other deficits, are struggling to meet the seriousness of the moment. The thing about these other leaders is they don’t go out of their way to remind the public how out of their depth they are.

I don’t think Joe Biden is anybody’s (other than Mrs. Biden’s) idea of the leader we need now. He doesn’t have to be to beat Trump. At this rate, Trump is going to beat Trump — and take GOP control of the Senate down with him. All he needs to do is stay away from the podium and let Pence, Fauci, and Birx handle it. That’s it! He can’t even manage that, though. Joe Biden doesn’t need to get on TV right now to help his campaign. Trump is Biden’s best possible surrogate.

UPDATE: Really interesting comment by Wyoming Doc:

Rod, this post is a knife right through the heart of medical professionals who are looking for truth – and reverence to medical ideals – and the tenets of ethical medical research.

I never dreamed as a young man I would see the politicization of medical research – but here we are. This has been going on for a while in red vs blue America – but this pandemic has really accelerated this dramatically.

What do I mean?

When I first heard news reports about this Lysol incident – my first reaction was “What on earth has he done now?”. That prompted me to actually listen to the statement you quoted above. It was actually the cable news shows that injected the words Lysol and Clorox and bleach into the conversation – not Trump. What he said though was still moronic but in a completely different way. The truth is both modalities – UV light and surface chemicals – for the treatment of various infections are in the early stages of research trials all across America – and we are talking early – as in infancy. Some of the work from what I can tell is still in animal phases. These trials are at very few and very select locations. 1 to 4 hospitals each. They would NEVER be available to the general public in a widespread way at this time – there is no guarantees they will work – and indeed they may actually be very harmful. This is called medical research. It is in the early stages an ugly business. As far as I know, none of this stuff is ready for prime time at all. My supposition is that he was sitting around the conference table – and some of the medical experts were talking about this research in a very abstract way for the treatment of COVID. He probably thought it was GEE WHIZ STAR TREK stuff – and had diarrhea of the mouth at the press conference. He does have a very beautiful mind, of course. The word “disinfectant” in this setting means something entirely different to an Infectious Disease specialist than it does to Joe Q Public. He undoubtedly heard this research earlier described by the experts with that word – and unfortunately used it. The very fact he said anything about this is most unfortunate. And he should have learned by now – when it comes to specialized expertise like medicine – sit down and shut up and let the experts have the stage. The vast majority of adults I know learned that skill long long ago.

And this is how this will affect medical research. Already this weekend, with hysterical laughter, all of Blue America is dismissing both of these modalities as a total joke. If Trump says anything – it therefore must be retarded or demonic or both. The most promising and the farthest along of any of these trials was being done by a company called AYTU BIO and their Healight device to try to treat COVID in the lungs with intra-tracheal UV light. This is FDA approved – and is being done at UCLA and Cedars Sinai. I have learned today that both TWITTER and YOUTUBE have at least partially deplatformed this company – for reasons that are completely unclear to me. My guess is UV light therapy is now associated with Trump and no longer fits the blue news agenda. But if any of your readers have better information about this I would love to know. The fact that this happened this soon to the President’s statement is very alarming to me…..

What if the research on this gets canned because of this. More tragically – WHAT IF IT ACTUALLY WORKS? This is the tragedy. Medical research should never have to do with politics. Ever. The cost and expense and priorities of it have everything to do with politics – but the actual mechanics and results – NEVER. This is a very slippery slope we are traveling as a country. I despair frequently.

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