The NY Times on Trump’s little gaffe:

In Maryland, so many callers flooded a health hotline with questions that the state’s Emergency Management Agency had to issue a warning that “under no circumstances” should any disinfectant be taken to treat the coronavirus. In Washington State, officials urged people not to consume laundry detergent capsules. Across the country on Friday, health professionals sounded the alarm.

Injecting bleach or highly concentrated rubbing alcohol “causes massive organ damage and the blood cells in the body to basically burst,” Dr. Diane P. Calello, the medical director of the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System, said in an interview. “It can definitely be a fatal event.”

Oddly enough, massive organ damage isn’t a cure for COVD-19.

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,” Mr. Trump said after a presentation from William N. Bryan, an acting under secretary for science at the Department of Homeland Security, detailed the virus’s possible susceptibility to bleach and alcohol.

Well it’s like this – lots of things are susceptible to bleach, or fire, or nuclear weapons. If you have flies in your house you can burn the house down to get rid of them (they’ll still be in the vicinity, but they’re not in the house any more), but then you have to deal with the no-house issue. It’s the same principle with chugging bleach to wipe out a virus. There’s this word “overkill”? Perhaps you’ve heard it? Chugging bleach would definitely be overkill.

“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” Mr. Trump said on Friday to journalists gathered in the Oval Office. The president said he had posed his theory on cleaning the body with disinfectant “in the form of a sarcastic question to a reporter,” which also was not true — he had said it unprompted to Mr. Bryan.

“Unprompted” is a useful word when it comes to Trump. It so often describes what he’s doing. He’s startlingly random, which is one of our chief signals of the slushy state of his brain. Nobody asked him for his thoughts on drinking bleach, he offered them without any prompting at all whatsoever.

Others inside the administration raised questions about why Mr. Bryan, whose background is not in health or science, had been invited to deliver a presentation. Mr. Bryan, whose expertise is in energy infrastructure and security, is serving in an acting capacity as the head of the department’s science and technology directorate.

Also there’s a whistleblower complaint saying he manipulated government policy to serve his financial interests and then lied to Congress about it, but whatever.

Mr. Bryan was invited by the vice president’s office to coronavirus task force meetings on Wednesday and Thursday to talk about a study that his department had done relating to heat and the conditions in which the coronavirus can thrive or be dampened. On Thursday, Mr. Bryan presented a graphic to the room, according to four people briefed on the events.

A graphic! No wonder Trump paid attention.

Before Mr. Bryan took the lectern in the White House Briefing Room, Dr. Birx and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a member of the coronavirus task force, made a few revisions to his presentation, officials said.

As he listened to Mr. Bryan, the president became increasingly excited, and also felt the need to demonstrate his own understanding of science, according to three of the advisers. So Mr. Trump went ahead with his theories about the chemicals.

Oh lord. Trump getting excited. Trump getting increasingly excited. What a nightmare that conjures up.

Mr. Trump’s hopeful comments about disinfectant use coincided with an alarming rise in accidents with household cleaning products in recent weeks, according to doctors who monitor activity at poison call centers. On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a growing number of calls to poison control centers and a significant increase in accidental exposures to household cleaners and disinfectants.

The F.D.A. has moved to tamp down on merchants online that have encouraged the ingestion of products made with disinfectants and cleaning agents, including chlorine dioxide, a compound commonly used as a bleach. The products have found favor with conspiracy theorists and fringe activists online who peddle chlorine dioxide as “Magical Mineral Solution,” or M.M.S.

And then