The president’s out here willing to try anything to get us out of this mess and all he gets is negativity from the “cleaning products” arm of the deep state.

Due to recent speculation and social media activity, RB (the makers of Lysol and Dettol) has been asked whether internal administration of disinfectants may be appropriate for investigation or use as a treatment for coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).

As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route). As with all products, our disinfectant and hygiene products should only be used as intended and in line with usage guidelines. Please read the label and safety information.

Hats off to Kayleigh McEnany, the new White House press secretary, for doing her best to spin yesterday’s inane digression about bringing “light inside the body” or injecting something to do “almost a cleaning” of the lungs in order to halt the virus:

JUST IN—@PressSec issues a statement to defend the President’s comments about the possibility of using disinfectants to tackle #Coronavirus: pic.twitter.com/ljsnVe5lm9

— Weijia Jiang (@weijia) April 24, 2020

She’s right, he did say that “you’re going to have to use medical doctors” to test his idea. I’m looking forward to the randomized clinical trials for Lysol IV drips.

The video of Birx reacting is worth its weight in gold. You should have resigned in protest and gone to work for the states when Trump gave you the opening, doc.

Here is Dr. Birx's reaction when President Trump asks his science advisor to study using UV light on the human body and injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/MVno5X7JMA

— Daniel Lewis (@Daniel_Lewis3) April 24, 2020

How did we reach the point where the president hears a DHS official say something about disinfectants working to kill the virus on *surfaces* and starts riffing about their efficacy inside the human body? It’s pretty simple, says the Times. He doesn’t prepare for the briefings. He’s reacting in real time to the information he’s processing, and somehow in his brain the idea of an internal “cleaning” made enough sense that he figured it was worth tossing out there to the planet off the cuff.

The daily White House coronavirus task force briefing is the one portion of the day that Mr. Trump looks forward to, although even Republicans say that the two hours of political attacks, grievances and falsehoods by the president are hurting him politically.

Mr. Trump will hear none of it. Aides say he views them as prime-time shows that are the best substitute for the rallies he can no longer attend but craves.

Mr. Trump rarely attends the task force meetings that precede the briefings, and he typically does not prepare before he steps in front of the cameras. He is often seeing the final version of the day’s main talking points that aides have prepared for him for the first time although aides said he makes tweaks with a Sharpie just before he reads them live. He hastily plows through them, usually in a monotone, in order to get to the question-and-answer bullying session with reporters that he relishes.

If it’s true that he thinks of the briefings as ersatz rallies then logically he’d see no problem with riffing on whatever subject comes to mind, whether he knows the first thing about it or not. That’s how his rallies work. They’re his chance to vent his stream of consciousness before an adoring audience willing to sit rapt and listen to him talk about anything, which is probably how he imagines the TV audience for the briefings too. Anyone else puzzling over an internal “cleaning” of the body with disinfectants would run the idea by Fauci and Birx before taking it live on TV if the point of the briefings was to provide useful information about COVID to the public. But if the point is simply to get the president some face time with his fans, who cares if the information is useful, harmful, or somewhere in between?

Relatedly, a new announcement from the FDA:

They go on to remind the reader that hydroxychloroquine “should be limited to clinical trial settings or for treating certain hospitalized patients” under compassionate use protocols and that HCQ shouldn’t be purchased from online pharmacies without a prescription. As Jeryl Bier says, it’s bananas that the president has concluded that a key part of his job during a pandemic is to talk up different drugs at his briefings, whether it’s hydroxychloroquine or Clorox. The only thing he should have to say each day is how much progress has been made in the past 24 hours towards getting testing and contact tracing where they need to be to have the economy reopen safely sooner rather than later. Everything else isn’t just a distraction and beyond his purview, it reeks of panic. If you can’t or don’t want to do the nuts and bolts of your job then of course you’ll be heavily invested psychologically in quick fixes and miracle cures.

Even his fans have begun to adjust to that. A new AP poll finds that not even half of Republicans say they trust the information he’s providing on coronavirus “a great deal.” Among all adults, just 23 percent say so. I think most of the public treats what he says about COVID-19 the way Fauci and Birx do: They have to listen to it because his office entitles him to pontificate on a grand stage but they don’t need to take any of it seriously. And they certainly don’t have to take it literally.

Here’s one of his top advisors on hydroxychloroquine, another guy from New York City who’ll seize any excuse to enjoy the spotlight, wondering last night on Fox why we don’t do contact tracing for cancer, heart disease, and, uh, other non-infectious illnesses.

Rudy Giuliani calls extensive tracing ridiculous and says we should do tracing for cancer, heart disease, and obesity because a lot of things kill more than Coronavirus pic.twitter.com/GOFLGTr0SN

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 24, 2020