Friday on CNN, anchor Jake Tapper dubbed President Donald Trump’s comments on Thursday suggesting doctors should investigate if disinfectants could be injected as a way to treat the coronavirus and the president’s subsequent claim that he was being sarcastic as “Lysol-gate.”
Tapper said, “The death toll in the United States this afternoon now reaching what was once an unthinkable number. More than 50,000 people in the United States lost to coronavirus. To put this in perspective, at this hour a month ago, that number was 646 dead. Health experts caution the actual death toll assuredly much higher than 50,000. Exactly two months ago, President Trump tweeted, quote, ‘The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.’ We can clearly now see that was not the case then, and it is not the case now amid this horrific death toll.”
He continued, “President Trump, meanwhile, continues to make bizarre public statements. Ones at odds with medical and scientific expertise. The president last night suggesting that, quote, ‘injecting’ disinfectant could be used as a treatment for coronavirus. In response, the official Twitter account of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now tweeted a warning that Americans should, quote, ‘following the instructions on the product label to ensure safe and effective use.’ The company that makes Lysol also felt the need to issue a public statement warning customers to not consume their products. The White House press secretary and the president’s factotums in the right-wing media claimed that the press was taking President Trump’s comments out of context, which we were not. Then this afternoon, the president made their empty defenses of him even less rooted in fact when he claimed he had been sarcastic, and he was posing the questions to journalists, quote, ‘just to see what would happen,’ unquote, which is not remotely what happened. Simply put, it’s a bald-faced lie.”
He added, “The president wasn’t even talking, posing the bizarre question about disinfectants to journalists. He was talking to an official of the Department of Homeland Security who had been talking about how sunlight and disinfectants help to kill the coronavirus when it was in the air and on nonporous surfaces, not when it was in the human body.”
Tapper concluded, “What’s more important than Lysol-gate itself is what this all suggests about the president’s ability to handle this crisis, which has now killed more than 50,000 people in the United States.”
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