The Bleach Speech Was a Year Ago. It Must Never Happen Again.

A year ago yesterday, President Trump gave an infamous news conference in which he suggested that people could inject themselves with bleach as a way to mitigate the Covid-19 virus. The moment drew attention once again to the ignorance of the president and ineffectual response of government, and it the spawned endless memes of Dr. Deborah Birx, whose eyes and face as Trump spoke said it all.

Olivia Troy, a whistleblower of sorts who has put out a video produced by the Republican Accountability Project, served on Trump’s coronavirus task force at this time. She explained that earlier that day, the task force had held their daily White House meeting, during which the Department of Homeland Security provided a briefing indicating that sunshine and disinfectants could potentially reduce the number of hours that the virus could live on a surface.

Trump apparently misunderstood that information and, to the team’s shock, began to ad lib from the podium about disinfectants and ultraviolet light possibly being used within the body, looking frequently over at Dr. Birx to ask whether they could look into that. Birx came out of the meeting and, according to Troy, asked why Trump kept looking at her, as she had nothing to do with that study. “He just threw away all of the work we’ve done,” Birx declared in exasperation.

The Task Force huddled to discuss how to counter the president’s message and make sure people did not actually ingest things like bleach. The CDC, apparently wary of directly contradicting the president so soon after he spoke, put out a lukewarm warning in an attempt to mitigate the damage Trump had done, but it failed to directly address what the president had said.

News media and makers of disinfectants like Lysol, however, moved swiftly to counter Trump’s dangerous statement. Even Fox News reported on warnings from manufacturers of household cleaners, though it buried this beneath headlines like “Media Erupts Over Trump Comments on Disinfectant” as if the press were overreacting again. 

They were not overreacting, it turns out. A month later, the CDC conducted a study of over five hundred people and a full four percent of respondents indicated that they had drunk or gargled diluted bleach, while another said they had used soapy water or disinfectants to protect themselves from Covid-19.

This history demonstrates, once again, that there is a significant portion of the population willing to believe even the most dangerous and outrageous misinformation put out by the former president, despite all the available and good information to the contrary. This comes as no surprise to many observers, given the wide acceptance of his repeated lies about the election being stolen. But it also shows that a sizeable percentage will follow him down a path even when it puts their own lives and health at risk. The presumption that Trump is speaking the truth, even when it is objectively and verifiably not the case, is strong evidence that MAGA is a cult rather than just a political movement. Indeed, many literally drank the bleach kool-aid.

This is more than just theoretical. There are policy decisions that can and should arise from this lesson. Importantly, large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter should never reconsider their decisions to deplatform the former president. This is no longer about the marketplace of ideas and free speech. There is no First Amendment right to spread false and dangerous ideas on a private site, and these tech giants must hold the line or lives will be lost. Whatever marginal political value his tweets and posts have is strongly outweighed by the deadly effect of his false statements.

The social media companies could not stop Trump from talking and reaching hundreds of millions of gullible people while he was president. But they can stop him from doing that now, and on this anniversary of the Bleach Speech, the social media platforms must remember this and extend his ban indefinitely.