Tuesday is the four-year-anniversary of one of the grossest moments of the entire Donald Trump presidency: The day that he suggested people inject bleach or some other form of disinfectant into their bodies in order to protect themselves from COVID-19.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes marked this milestones as a means of answering the question that he’s been focused on a lot this year — “Are you better off than you were four years ago” — with a decisive “no.”
But while showing footage of the moment, Hayes admitted it still shocks him all these years later. “It honestly is so much worse than I remembered,” he exclaimed.
Watch the clip here:
So that question was first asked by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential election, and it’s considered one of many reasons why ultimately Carter lost that election. And Chris Hayes’ segment began with a supercut of various presidential ticket candidates referencing it over the years, including Paul Ryan, former Barack Obama, Bob Dole, Joe Lieberman, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Sara Palin, Dick Cheney and Reagan himself.
“You know, when we first conceived of this series, we had a few particular dates circled on the calendar with a big sharpie,” Hayes said after the supercut ended. “Today was one of those days, the kind of day where you definitely wouldn’t want to be asking the question, but Trump and his people just can’t help themselves.”
Hayes then showed a clip of Maria Bartiromo asking the question today on Fox News, and answering it with a frankly racist joke.
“The obvious answer for all of us is, no, we are not better off. Now, if you’re an illegal alien,” she said as other Fox News personalities laughed, “you are better off today.”
When that clip ended, Hayes continued, “Well, I don’t know, Maria. Let’s take a look at how we were doing four years ago today, April 23, 2020, full month into the first COVID-19 wave, 2,400 deaths a day. As the nation approached 50,000 total deaths, no vaccine in sight, some states were opening with Trump’s encouragement, before they had really flattened the curve, even as we were learning the spread of the virus was much worse than authorities had initially thought.”
Then Hayes cued up footage from the lengthy COVID press conference Trump gave on April 23, 2020.
For those who can’t watch the clip, the conference included Trump a moment where Trump insulted Anthony Fauci, and then another where the sitting president of the United States actually gloated about how at the time, states with a Democratic Party majority were experiencing the worst impact of COVID-19.
“It is interesting that the states that are in trouble do happen to be blue. It is interesting. If you look around, the states that seem to have the problem happen to be Democrat,” Trump literally said.
“New York and New Jersey were in a lot of trouble long before the plague came. And they were, they had a lot of problems long before the plague came.” Trump also said.
In another moment, a journalist noted to Trump, who by this point had already promoted the falsehood that hydroxychloroquine could cure COVID, advice that likely got a lot of people killed, that people watching his briefings “want to get information and guidance and want to know what to do. They’re not looking for rumors.”
Trump replied, “I’m the president, and you’re fake news.”
“That’s all beyond insane and enraging,” Hayes said after the clip ended. “It wasn’t even the darkest moment four years ago. That came right after William Bryan, who’s the head of science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security, gave a lesson on what we know about how the virus survives outside the body.”
Hayes then played a clip of this, in which Bryan among other things noted how effective disinfectants are at killing viruses on outside surfaces. “I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds. And that’s with no manipulation,” he said.
But then, Hayes noted, came Trump’s remarks. He began by explaining to the press that he’d already asked Hayes if human bodies could be hit “with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” continuing, and again this is verbatim, “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.”
After an awkward ‘we’ll look into it’ style answer from Hayes, Trump continued, “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. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s — that’s pretty powerful.”
“It honestly is so much worse than I remembered,” Hayes said after the footage ended. “Thousands of people were dying a day. That was the president of the United States, in the midst of this epic, historic disaster, and his big brain idea is that maybe you could combat the coronavirus by shining a bright light inside your various orifices, or maybe by injecting disinfectant — disinfectant into your body, like a cleaning.”
Hayes then noted how the makers of Lysol very quickly issued a warning that people should absolutely not try this, and that there was a spike in calls to poison control hotlines from people asking about it, as well as reports of people actually using bleach like mouthwash.
“The clownish, reckless, dangerous, incompetent handling of a genuine crisis, the first one he faced, a pandemic that went on to kill a million Americans, that’s part of the record we can all consider when we ask, sitting here today, whether we are better off today than we were four years ago,” he concluded.