Trump just got caught in an incredible lie. One is about his competence on medical matters. This man does not have even the training to be a medical orderly, yet he told people that they could use disinfectants internally. No -- they are for sanitizing surfaces, and they are dangerous poisons, as the manufacturers of those products containing sodium hypochlorite or carbolic acid make abundantly clear. The second is that he was saying this sarcastically. Donald Trump seems to lack any sense of humor whatsoever. If he says something funny, then it is by accident.
The simple reality is that any substance that kills anything else (viruses, bacteria, mold, fungus, yeast) is harmful in a way to us. Antibiotics and chemotherapy agents selectively damage bacteria or cancerous cells enough to hurt them but not quite enough to kill us. Disinfectants are less harmful to us than to stuff on a surface because we have dead skin cells as protection against the toxic qualities of traces of some nasty chemicals. The problem with COVID-18 is that as a virus it is nearly impossible to kill without killing us. We and viruses are more similar. A virus is largely genetic material as DNA or RNA (COVID-19 is RNA)... and because it is difficult to kill the viruses in a human without killing the human, chemical agents do not work on viruses.
Covering for a falsehood even if said in mere error is itself a lie. The honest thing to do is to say "I was wrong"after one finds out that one was wrong. It is best to be right from the start, but that is a privilege that many of us do not have. People have said that they were wrong about bigotry in the past and that got the late George Wallace to win the black vote in Alabama for a gubernatorial election. He could never undo the hurtful statement "Segregation yesterday, segregation today, and segregation forever" as he was infamously known for saying. But he could say that he knew that what he said then was terribly wrong and hurtful, and he could repudiate segregation with integrity. Trump is not only stupid, vain, and cruel; he is also dishonest and cowardly in his inability to repudiate his own errors.
It is far too early to see how that will work in polling.
The simple reality is that any substance that kills anything else (viruses, bacteria, mold, fungus, yeast) is harmful in a way to us. Antibiotics and chemotherapy agents selectively damage bacteria or cancerous cells enough to hurt them but not quite enough to kill us. Disinfectants are less harmful to us than to stuff on a surface because we have dead skin cells as protection against the toxic qualities of traces of some nasty chemicals. The problem with COVID-18 is that as a virus it is nearly impossible to kill without killing us. We and viruses are more similar. A virus is largely genetic material as DNA or RNA (COVID-19 is RNA)... and because it is difficult to kill the viruses in a human without killing the human, chemical agents do not work on viruses.
Covering for a falsehood even if said in mere error is itself a lie. The honest thing to do is to say "I was wrong"after one finds out that one was wrong. It is best to be right from the start, but that is a privilege that many of us do not have. People have said that they were wrong about bigotry in the past and that got the late George Wallace to win the black vote in Alabama for a gubernatorial election. He could never undo the hurtful statement "Segregation yesterday, segregation today, and segregation forever" as he was infamously known for saying. But he could say that he knew that what he said then was terribly wrong and hurtful, and he could repudiate segregation with integrity. Trump is not only stupid, vain, and cruel; he is also dishonest and cowardly in his inability to repudiate his own errors.
It is far too early to see how that will work in polling.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.