Whitewashing History Through the Miracle of Bleach

“In a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,” - Donald Trump, 2017, to Time Magazine

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

As of right now, 4:10 PM EST on April 25th, 2020, these are the three most recent posts on Raw Story. One states that Trump's claims that disinfectants can be safely introduced into the human body has resulted in a large spike of calls to New York City's Poison Control Center, another that anti-malarial prescriptions, from physicians, have spiked 46-fold and the last that Democrats should be openly questioning Trump's sanity.

    Questioning his sanity after his April 23rd quack press conference, ironically, on World Book Day, should have been done way back on the campaign trail in 2015. It should have been done after Trump got the GOP nomination in July of 2016. And it should have been asked by prominent Democrats and journalists literally every single day since Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017 and delivered a narcoleptic paean to the brutality of law enforcement.

     Every time I hear Trump speak (and, let me assure you, it is quite a painful daily ordeal, akin to raking one's finger nails down a blackboard or a clean pane of glass but I have no choice but to resolutely sally forth, as this is my job), I think of a marvelous quote from (Sorry, d r i f t g l a s s) David Brooks of the New York Times. In May of 2017, Brooks wrote in, "When the World is Led By a Child", "We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar."

      It has to be said that, despite Our Mr. Brooks' snuffling, patrician right wing world view, he'd had Trump pegged all along as few had. For Lo, these last several years, many in the mainstream media not only in the United States but all over the world had strained for gravitas, to take this man seriously because that is what convention and journalistic ethics mandated. For to openly doubt his sanity would anger and alienate whatever right wing viewers and readers they'd have but also, accusing the "president" of mental incapacity would be, well, unprofessional. And partisan. And subjective, a violation of a sacrosanct Goldwater Rule, one that is now being seriously tested by the lunatic who, deprived of his Nuremberg hate rallies and golf outings at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster. is slowly sliding more and more deeply into insanity.

     But how professional will it seem both in the here and now and in the pitiless eyes of posterity when media historians look back on these bizarre, surreal days and see that the mainstream media, principally ours, continually took this man seriously? That they somehow kept a collective straight face and described the "president's" latest rant as "controversial" or "ill-advised" or "surprising"? If it holds true during this flaming, rolling dumpster fire of a "presidency" that journalism is history's first draft, then my colleagues are already doing Donald Trump a favor by not uniting in questioning this man's cognitive faculties. As even the most tyrannical rulers enjoy a pendulum shift in opinion across the decades, Trump will one day be viewed more kindly and generously than he is now, especially with the set that also views Hitler favorably. 

     And this strenuous ignoring of Trump's mental decline has led us to April 23rd: When Trump openly floated the idea, to a horrified Dr. Deborah Birx, the chief coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force, of injecting disinfectants into the body somehow and/or blasting our innards with black light, something noiselessly but perceptibly shifted. And now we're hearing from the British Guardian that Trump partly got his ingenious idea for bleach from a letter he'd received from some Genesis II huckster promoting the same thing. Yes, Trump got his latest shockingly brilliant idea from Florida Man.

"What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?"

That was an infamous quote in a speech that Trump had delivered in Michigan to a largely African American audience in 2016. Well, back then, the stakes were pretty big and serious, although suddenly this general election doesn't look so important anymore. But it was a quote that Trump had dusted off three weeks ago and redelivered during one of his Baghdad Bob smoke screens this month. And, moreso than in 2016, this time, the stakes are mortal. Frankly, it's a miracle that not one death has been directly attributable to his horrifying home remedies.
    However, it hasn't been for lack of trying.
    First, after saying at one of his hate rallies last month that it was a "Democratic hoax", he then downplayed the virus as it screamed across the Pacific at exactly the speed of a jetliner. Then he crowed that we had 15 cases, tops and in no time we'd be down to almost zero even as Johns Hopkins' numbers were saying otherwise. Then, when the casualties got too big to ignore, he admitted it was indeed a pandemic and that he knew it was one before anyone else was using the word. Then he said, "like a miracle," it would disappear by April.

     According to the latest data from the COVID Tracking Project, we've lost 51,000 Americans thus far in April and we still have five more days to go. In Massachusetts alone, since yesterday we'd recorded 7325 new cases, by far an alltime high, and have lost 370 Bay Staters since yesterday. So, April is the cruelest month, indeed.
    Undeterred, ever the optimist, our Dear Leader had been desperate to give us good tidings and cheer by promising testing kits that don't work, hydroxychloroquine that could kill you, UV light that doesn't do shit and injecting disinfectants that could also kill you. The poor man's so heartbroken, he lumbered out of the James Brady briefing room last night after not taking a single question and is not planning on doing these Happy Talks any longer.
     So, top Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer need to start doing more than waggle their gnarled fingers and tut tut the "president" when he threatens to get people killed by preying on their colossal ignorance and hanging on his every word. At this point, he's hardly any better than Jim Jones. They need to start putting into the Congressional Record as well as into the historical record that begins with the 4th Estate that this man, for want of a better word, is irretrievably, irrevocably insane.
     We need to start doing this and pushing for the activation of the 25th Amendment so at least future generations will know that We the People did more than hunker down cowering in fear, hoarded toilet paper and drank bleach out of fear of dying. That tens of millions blindly followed the King Lear of "presidents" whose only infallibility was in always making the worst possible decision every. Single. Time.