@artemesia @NosirrahSec @mattblaze Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see anything in that article that says anything different from what I've been saying.

Here's the opening sentence of that article: "One year ago today, President Donald Trump took to the White House briefing room and encouraged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting Covid."

Which is exactly what I said he did. And yes, it was stupid and irresponsible and dangerous (which is also what I've said throughout this very strange discussion).

What the article _doesn't_ say, because it isn't true, is that Donald Trump urged the public to inject bleach. And that's all I've been saying.

@gjm @mattblaze a competent person that genuinely believed they were making a useful suggestion might’ve put those bizarre ideas forward in private. A competent person would know that asking questions like that publicly would cause desperate people to try it.

While I normally applaud people fighting disinformation this isn’t helpful, because while what Matt said is a simplification it’s not incorrect.

@gjm @mattblaze It's really not worth arguing what Trump does or does not say when he's off-script.

Go back, read the transcript or look at video of the statement. What he said was meandering and incoherent. He didn't tell people to drink bleach and he also didn't direct anyone to research cures. He just made word-shaped sounds for a few minutes while everyone smiled and humored him and tried to pretend the President of the United States of America wasn't rambling like he was in line at a casino's noontime buffet.

This was a man rambling on about something interesting he read and barely remembered, like people do when they don't know what they're talking about at all but feel compelled to say something. He has an extremely nasty habit of doing that: just stringing words together and letting other people figure out the meaning. It's why people so often interpret his words differently: because he has the conman's gift of never actually saying anything of value, never taking a concrete position that could be disproven, and rarely even getting to the point.

The words that come out of his mouth are Schrödinger's sentences when he's off-script. He rambles like my grandfather at the dinner table, only we didn't elect my grandfather to be leader of the free world for awhile (thank God).

I wish we hadn't elected someone like him instead, because it's four years we ain't getting back.