I don't watch the 5:30 Follies every night. Some nights I have better things to do.
Like, doing nothing but joining my cat at staring off into space thinking about all the wildebeest running free down the streets of Old Town Alexandria, Virginia.
I wish I had done that Thursday night when Donald Trump decided, now that his miracle hydroxychloroquine cure might have actually killed some people, hopped back on his unicorn and chased after another.
The issue was a report by a government researcher about the effects of light and chemicals on the coronavirus on surfaces and in the air. Ultraviolet light does, it seems, kill the virus - or at least diminishes its useful life. So do certain chemicals, bleaches, and disinfectants.
The researcher said (via the Washington Post):
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"bleach killed the virus in about five minutes and isopropyl alcohol killed it in 30 seconds. In tests, sunlight and high temperatures also appeared to shorten the virus's life on surfaces and in the air."
This is why we have been told a thousand times to wash our hands at least thousand times a day (which I do).
Trump, however, took that rather dry report and turned it into another "it will be gone like a miracle" moment and described how he thinks researchers should investigate injecting patients with disinfectant, especially injecting it into their lungs.
"Is there a way," Trump asked the researcher from the lectern, "we can do something like that by injection inside, or a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that."
The British company that makes Lysol, according to Politico.com, was so shocked by Trump's suggestion it be injected into the lungs of patients, that it rushed out a statement that
"warned against the 'internal administration' of their products after President Donald Trump suggested injecting disinfectants into the human body as a potential cure for the coronavirus."
On the ultraviolet light front, Trump suggested
"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 the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way."
As Trump was discussing his new miracle cure delivery systems, Dr. Deborah Birx was sitting along the wall looking, as someone said, like she was blinking S-O-S.
SIDEBAR
There is video of Dr. Birx shot by a CNN producer embedded in the Washington Post story.
At one point, Dr. Birx explained to Trump that heat has been a known killer of viruses for many, many years which is why people who are infected develop a fever as a defense.
We don't know if Trump was surprised to find out that this process has been in pretty wide circulation way before he thought of it.
Some Republicans are restless about Trump's daily program. Trump likes it because he gets upwards of an hour per night on all three cable nets, he gets to talk about whatever he wants to talk about, he gets to make up (as we saw Thursday night) miracle cures for diseases, he gets to say good things about Governors who have paid appropriate homage and bad things about those who have not and, best of all, he gets to yell at reporters who he claims are asking "nasty questions."
Like most polls, people see (and talk about) the part that supports their candidate or cause. In the RealClearPolitics.com average of polls Trump has gone from 47.4 approve and 49.7 dissapprove - almost a tie - on April 1 to a more normal 46.1 and 51.4 approve/disapprove on April 24.
Alex Castellanos, a long-time Republican strategist, was quoted in Poltico.com as saying:
"Donald Trump's numbers are harder than diamonds. He can't budge them with dynamite because he is who he is, and that won't change until Washington freezes over."
Castellanos goes onto say that Trump needs to define Biden, but Trump can't train his ire on one person when he's got 50 Governors, 535 Members of the House and Senate, and who knows how many Mayors to be angry at.
Every night.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to that Washington Post story that includes the Dr. Birx video and to the Politico.com piece about the makers of Lysol.
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