Over on Twitter, the left is having a field day. Tide Pods? What could be more exciting than to claim that President Trump endorses eating Tide Pods as a solution to the coronavirus pandemic? Never mind that he didn't.

They've based their excitement on this:

WASHINGTON — After President Donald Trump wondered Thursday about possibly injecting disinfectants into people infected with the coronavirus, "Tide Pods" and other household cleaners began trending on Twitter. "And then I saw the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way we could do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning," the president said during his White House press briefing. "As you see it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that." Afterwards, Bill Bryan, an undersecretary of science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security, clarified that that wasn't possible and said, "We don't do that within that lab, at our labs." However, Trump replied: "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work."

Oh, the merriment. And the tweets came out like these:

#disinfectant #Clorox #lysol



The Covida:

• 6 oz Clorox

• 2 oz. silver tequila

• 1 oz. Cointreau

• 1 oz. lime juice

• A spritz of Lysol

• Coarse salt for the rim



Note: In case of organ failure, take Hydroxycloriquine. Fix you right up! pic.twitter.com/i25a83G4pQ — RMc23 (@ItsMeRMc23) April 24, 2020

Ahead of the curve, killing the coronavirus with a solar eclipse. Next up, a snack of Tide Pods with a Clorox chaser. #Clorox pic.twitter.com/UdOlbfaJyu — P. Jones (@WickedBitchCTex) April 24, 2020

You know, I gotta say. If Trump wants to inject himself with disinfectant to kill the coronavirus, I'm not going to rush to dissuade him. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 24, 2020

Here's a full celebrity cavalcade of cracks and comments assembled by Deadline Hollywood.

Here's a particularly pompous ass who couldn't even muster the humor of the others:

The press coverage, meanwhile, was positively venomous in its distortions. Even the USA Today piece linked above (once you read down into the fill) was full of false claims about President Trump insisting that hydroxychloroquine be used as treatment, something he never called for. The rest were even worse.

Who's the clown here? Not Trump. Trump is doing something that hipsterly and hoity-toity business consultants have been exhorting us poor pudknockers out there in our work pods and cubicles to do for decades: thinking outside the box.

That's what this is: the very specter of thinking outside the box. Oh, the horror.

From a limited base of knowledge (and sometimes an outside perspective can be useful, but not always), Trump was looking around at what he knew worked for sure (in this case, the use of Chlorox, Lysol, and other less well known disinfectant products known to slaughter the coronavirus on hard surfaces) and wondering aloud if it could in some way be employed to kill the coronavirus inside people. It was the same with his spitballing on light treatments, something that also has some evidence to hook it to.

Writer Michael Fumento, who has considerable knowledge of epidemics and pandemics, noted this last March 8 in the New York Post:

More good news. This month, the Northern Hemisphere, which includes the countries with the most cases, starts heating up. Almost all respiratory viruses hate warm and moist weather. That's why flu dies out in America every year by May at the latest and probably why Latin America has reported only 25 coronavirus cases. The Philippines, where I live, has about a third of the US population, but it's so damned hot and humid here, so far we have had no confirmed cases of internal transmission.

Trump just wanted to throw out ideas. He never said to go drink Lysol, nor told anyone to experiment with injecting it directly; he just wondered if the medical community could find a way to do what it does to employ the killer properties of these proven disinfectants and explore finding whatever it is that these chemicals have, to find a cure for people. "Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't" does not sound like an endorsement of eating Tide Pods. Oh, how they laughed.

And they certainly would have laughed at Louis Pasteur, who noticed that milkmaids never seemed to get smallpox (based on their exposure to the far less lethal related virus in cowpox) and then used that as the basis for developing the concept of vaccines and herd immunity.

They would have laughed at Benjamin Franklin for noticing how lightning behaves on conductive iron sharpened to a point, the basis for his development of the lightning rod.

They would have laughed really hard at Dr. Barry Marshall, who infected himself by drinking a broth of peptic ulcer-causing bacterium with himself as the human guinea pig in order to prove that ulcers were brought on by bacteria, not stress. No thinking outside the box in Marshall's world of "settled science," either, and Marshall took a massive amount of abuse to reach his life-saving solution.

They probably still laugh at Dr. Robert Atkins for discovering the benefits of a low-carb diet in the 1960s after wondering why diabetic patients were so susceptible to obesity, or Clinton Ober, a cable TV installer and electrician who noticed how electrons from molecules in gravity of the Earth can provide health benefits based on barefoot walking.

Scientists, as they say in elementary school, notice things. This is why the term "settled science" is so toxic. Anyone who ever accomplishes anything must think outside the box.

Trump in fact is sending a message from the top to all the medical researchers out there that experiments and mistakes are fine — keep trying. He's fostering a culture of creativity and innovation, which is exactly what is needed to kill off this coronavirus.

Here's the other takeaway from Trump's disinfectant remark that produced such clown-show merriment from his critics: what the heck are their bright ideas?

Trump has demonstrated to the rest of us that he's engaged, engaged intensely, all cylinders turning, in finding a real cure for the coronavirus pandemic. If Trump were Obama, he'd appoint a blue ribbon commission and dust his hands off and wait for the next news cycle, leaving the whole thing to be stultified and forgotten. Trump by contrast is hands on and thinking constantly about how to win this invisible war.

If he comes up with a clunker of an idea, big deal — sweep it away, and get a new one. That's how he rolls. For the rest of us, it's immensely comforting to know that Trump is on the job and engaged, trying to help any way he can. That's leadership.

Trump deserves nothing but praise for his efforts to find a solution. The only real clowns out there are his ignorant, hostile-to-ideas critics.

Image credit: Needpix public domain