With all due respect, our president is an idiot

New York magazine

Jonathan Chait:

President Trump, encouraged by research suggesting that sunlight can kill the coronavirus, excitedly speculated last night that perhaps a new cure could be found by somehow bringing sunlight into the body of an infected patient. The possibility of a breakthrough cure excited him enough that he proposed another method, injecting disinfectant into the lungs somehow.

Trump’s defenders, straining to locate a justification, have seized on the response that Trump was not actually urging his audience to try out his notions in their homes. 

“Trump used the word ‘inject,’ but what he meant was using a process — which he left ‘medical doctors’ to define — in which patients’ lungs might be cleared of the virus, given new knowledge about its response to light and other factors,” insists Breitbart’s Joel Pollak. “Apparently there is no accusation too crazy for Trump’s critics to believe.” 

On the right, the controversy has become more evidence of liberal bias.

But it was not just the elite liberal media worried that some people would misunderstand Trump’s advice. The makers of Lysol, a product which is not known to be an organ of the left, were forced to rush out a public statement instructing consumers not to inject its products into their bodies.

It is true that Trump did not mean to steer his audience to try home remedies. But what he meant to do was, in some ways, equally stupid. He was brainstorming cutting-edge cures off the top of his head, in full view of television cameras. 

Leaping from the discovery that sunlight can kill the virus to suggesting, hey, maybe we can discover a cure that brings sunlight into the body is literally the response a young child would have. 

A person with any intelligence would understand that science is complicated. A layman is not going to just dream up a solution while standing at the lectern of the White House press room for a problem that the world’s leading medical researchers are already studying intently...

Rob's comment:

The illustration above would have been better if Trump was shown holding a bottle of Lysol or Clorox. 

This is more evidence that Trump doesn't really understand what it is to know something. He's been so successful bullshitting his way through life---enabled by a large inheritance from his father---he apparently assumes everyone is doing the same, even the scientists who are advising him on how to deal with the virus.

Hence, it's not surprising that he apparently thought he would help those phony experts and everyone out by doing some brainstorming---aka, bullshitting---himself.

All he demonstrated is how fucked we are with him as our president.

See also Donald J. Trump, Captain of the Titanic.