https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/23/trump-bleach-one-year-484399
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. It was a
watershed moment, soon to become iconic in the annals of presidential
briefings. It arguably changed the course of political history.
Some ex-Trump aides say they
don’t even think about that day as the wildest they experienced — with
the conceit that there were simply too many others. But for those there,
it was instantly shocking, even by Trump standards. It quickly came to
symbolize the chaotic essence of his presidency and his handling of the
pandemic. Twelve months later, with the pandemic still lingering and a
U.S. death toll nearing 570,000, it still does.
“For me, it was the craziest and
most surreal moment I had ever witnessed in a presidential press
conference,” said ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, who was
the first reporter at the briefing to question Trump’s musings about
bleach.
For
weeks, Trump had been giving winding, stream-of-consciousness updates
on the state of the Covid fight as it clearly worsened. So when he got
up from the Oval Office to brief reporters gathered in the James S.
Brady Press Briefing Room on April 23, there was no expectation that the
day’s proceedings would be any different than usual.
Birx recalls 'very uncomfortable' phone call from Trump following her Covid-19 warnings
Privately,
however, some of his aides were worried. The Covid task force had met
earlier that day — as usual, without Trump — to discuss the most recent
findings, including the effects of light and humidity on how the virus
spreads. Trump was briefed by a small group of aides. But it was clear
to some aides that he hadn’t processed all the details before he left to
speak to the press.
“A
few of us actually tried to stop it in the West Wing hallway,” said one
former senior Trump White House official. “I actually argued that
President Trump wouldn’t have the time to absorb it and understand it.
But I lost, and it went how it did.”
Trump
started his press conference that day by doing something he’d come to
loathe: pushing basic public safety measures. He called for the
“voluntary use of face coverings” and said of his administration,
“continued diligence is an essential part of our strategy.”
Quickly,
however, came a hint at how loose the guardrails were that day. Trump
introduced Bill Bryan, head of science and technology at the Department
of Homeland Security. “He’s going to be talking about how the virus
reacts in sunlight,” the president said. “Wait ‘til you hear the
numbers.”
As
Bryan spoke, charts were displayed behind him about surface
temperatures and virus half-lives. He preached, rather presciently, for
people to “move activities outside” and then detailed ongoing studies
involving disinfectants. “We tested bleach,” he said at one point. “I
can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.”
Standing
off to the side, Trump clasped his hands in front of his stomach,
nodded and looked out into the room of gathered reporters. When Bryan
was done, he strode slowly back to the lectern.
“A
question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally
into that world,” Trump began, clearly thinking the question himself,
“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s
ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that 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, and I think you said you’re
going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the
disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is
there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost
a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a
tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check
that.”
Dr.
Deborah Birx, Trump’s former coronavirus response coordinator, sat
silently off to the side as the president made these suggestions to her.
Later, she would tell ABC, “I didn’t know how to handle that episode,”
adding, “I still think about it every day.”
Inside
the Biden campaign, aides were shocked as well. They were working
remotely at that juncture, communicating largely over Signal. But the
import of what had happened became quickly evident to them.
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“Even
for him,” said one former Biden campaign aide, “this was
stratospherically insane and dangerous. It cemented the case we had been
making about his derelict covid response.”
In
short order, the infamous bleach press conference became a literal
rallying cry for Trump’s opponents, with Biden supporters dotting their
yards with “He Won’t Put Bleach In You” signs. For Trump, it was a
scourge. He would go on to insist that he was merely being sarcastic — a
claim at odds with the excited curiosity he had posing those questions
to Birx. His former team concedes that real damage was done.
“People
joked about it inside the White House like, ‘Are you drinking bleach
and injecting sunlight?’ People were mocking it and saying, ‘Oh let me
go stand out in the sun, and I’ll be safe from Covid,” said one former
administration official. “It honestly hurt. It was a credibility issue. …
It was hurting us even from an international standpoint, the
credibility at the White House.”
That
Trump was even at the lectern that day was head-scratching for many.
For weeks, he and his team had downplayed the severity of the Covid
crisis even as the president privately acknowledged to the Washington
Post’s Bob Woodward that it had the potential to be catastrophic. But as
it became clearer that the public was not buying the rosy assessments,
Trump had decided to take his fate into his own hands — assembling the
press on a daily basis to spin his way through the crisis.
He
loved it. The former administration official said Trump was elated with
the free airtime he was getting on television day after day. “He was
asking how much money that was worth,” the aide recalled. The coverage
was so ubiquitous that, at one point, Fox News’ Bret Baier attended the
briefing and peppered the president with questions because his own show
was being routinely interrupted.
The bleach episode changed all that.
Aides
immediately understood what a public health quagmire Trump’s remarks
had created. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted he
was being taken out of context.
“President
Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical
doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized
again during yesterday’s briefing,” McEnany said in a statement issued
the next day. “Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President
Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”
But behind the scenes, Trump’s
remarks were used as evidence by senior aides for why they needed to
crack down on unvetted information being put in front of the president.
“Either they didn’t know what he was going to say — which isn’t ideal —
or they didn’t push back before he went out to the briefing,” said a
former senior communications official in the Trump administration. “It
was a huge unforced error that could have been prevented.”
By then, White House aides were
already debating the efficacy of having Trump relay health information
to the public and having to answer whatever question a reporter might
throw his way. Some aides — along with Republican allies on Capitol Hill
— were pushing to get the president to take a back seat to his health
experts at the podium.
“It became like a presser for the
sake of having a presser. We didn’t have anything to announce or real
policy plans,” a former White House official said. “If you’re just
coming out and talking, a Q&A [with reporters] wasn’t going to be
helpful.”
Trump would end up doing only a
handful more press conferences after the bleach episode before picking
them back up again in July. A year later, the episode is still
considered a defining point in the Covid fight and a prime exhibit of
what can go wrong when an over-confident president believes he can
message his way through a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic.
“Undoubtedly [it was] a seminal
moment in presidential communications, and while it is easy to laugh it
off, I hope it educates leaders and communicators for decades,” said
former Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “But this was the
moment where we knew without any doubt that the government was in way
over its head, and its ability to both respond effectively and educate
Americans about what to do was not going to be anywhere close to meeting
the moment.”
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