Laura Ingraham Defends Trump’s Suggestion to Inject Disinfectant Into Covid-19 Patients: ‘He’s Hearing a Lot of Inputs from the Medical Community’

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham rallied round President Donald Trump on her Friday night show in a shameless segment that blamed the media for misinterpreting his previous days’ comments, in which Trump clearly suggested that one possible treatment for Covid-19 might involve the highly dangerous injection of disinfectant into people who have contracted the virus.

Notably, Ingraham never once aired or quoted any of Trump’s actual words from the Thursday coronavirus task force briefing.  Instead, she merely showed clips of the stunned responses on CNN and MSNBC to Trump’s highly irresponsible rhetoric. As a result, Fox News viewers were left to take her and her guests’ word that those universally aghast reactions were unfair exaggerations.

Trump, Ingraham did allow, bore perhaps a little of the burden of responsibility for how his own words came out.

“The president, maybe, wasn’t as clear as he could’ve been,” Ingraham magnanimously conceded, before suggesting he merely mixed up in his head some of the many cutting-edge Covid-19 treatments he’s been introduced to of late. “He’s hearing a lot of inputs from the medical community: ‘This is new, that’s new, this is an innovation.'”

Ingraham, notably, did not cite any groundbreaking studies that might involve the testing of direct injections of household disinfectants, like bleach or isopropyl alcohol, directly into the body. That is likely because such a course of action is highly toxic, if not fatal, as both the warning label on those products explicitly detail and medial experts like Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel emphasized just hours earlier on Ingraham’s own network. In fact, Ingraham did not even deign to mention the words “injection” or “disinfectant,” which lie at the very heart of Trump’s claim, one single time on Friday.

Another stunning omission: Ingraham did not point out to her viewers that Trump himself tried to back away from his own comments, calling them “sarcasm” in a transparently false attempt at damage control on Friday. Nor did she list Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto among the biased, anti-Trump pundits supposedly skewing the president’s words, despite the fact Cavuto had called out the president’s patently false claims while shredding the flimsy sarcasm excuse. Likewise, Ingraham did not mention Fox anchor Bret Baier, who also took Trump to task for his dubious, spur-of-the-moment medical advice, saying: “it is clearly something that he stepped in here.”

Instead, the Fox host leapt past all that evidence and attacked her own straw man concoction of Trump’s words: “So was he telling Americans to drink Clorox? Really?”

“Absolutely not,” guest and Fox contributor Sara Carter eagerly confirmed. “These are journalists that don’t let the facts stand in the way of their lies. They hate Donald Trump, the president, so much that they will twist his words whenever they can at the expense of the American people.”

Again, the facts of Trump’s actual words had, at no time, been revealed to Ingraham’s viewers — and Carter was not about to break that streak. After further attacks on the “Trump-hating media” that included checking off the standard, anti-press Republican talking point about “the Russia hoax,” Carter said: “Any American, and anybody with common sense, who watched this briefing knows he didn’t do this.”

“This” being a convenient catch-all euphemism to obscure the inconvenient reality of what Trump said.

“I’m watching this and I think, ‘Did he say Clorox and Lysol?’ And suddenly Lysol comes out with some big statement.…I guess people could take words and — I guess…” Ingraham said, drifting off, apparently not ready to encourage free-thinking viewers from judging Trump’s comments for themselves — which, at risk of being repetitive, was a courtesy she was unwilling to grant.

Immediately after, Ingraham pivoted away from Trump’s grossly irresponsible comments and focused her fire on the press. “You really get the sense that the media are trying to drive this narrative that Trump not only doesn’t want to save American lives but he’s basically just the Terminator here, but not in a good way,” Ingraham said, chuckling at her own joke.

“Not only that, it seems like they are on the other side,” said president of the right-leaning Accuracy in Media Adam Guillette, taking Ingraham’s anti-media handoff and running with it. “Trump is trying to fight the disease and I swear that some of them are rooting for the disease,” Guillette obscenely claimed, ignoring the number of journalists who have personally suffered from or died from Covid-19. From there, his rhetoric descended into an ugly series of jeremiads, none of which he bothered to back up with actual names or evidence.

“They rooted against hydroxychloroquine working, they were hoping it wouldn’t work. They are rooting against sunlight killing it. They are rooting against the summer heat wave killing it. You would swear they are for the disease. The only advisable actions that they offer are to a) freak out, or b) worship [New York Governor] Andrew Cuomo.”

And with that pithy sendoff about the coronavirus pandemic, what passes for media criticism on The Ingraham Angle mercifully came to an end.

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.