Last week, in an attempt to avoid the obvious reality that Trump would be a disaster, major media outlets engaged in an orgy of supposed fact checking. This week, I’ll document some of the worst of the bunch for posterity. Today’s carnage–the bleach incident.

Here’s what Trump uttered April 23, 2020:

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’d be interesting to check that.

Anyone who is arguing that Pritzker’s summary is fundamentally inaccurate is forgetting several things. First, the reactions by Fauci and Birx when Trump said that remind us that anyone who saw that at the time thought he was basically saying bleach the lungs. Second, as one public health professional put it, “I cringe to type this but as an expert in the field, I and most experts I know watched the “bleach” press conference live and we did not think Trump was joking about putting disinfectants/bleach inside the body and I think the contemporaneous reaction of Fauci/Birx confirmed that.”

The final, and horrifying, observation is that poisonings more than doubled after Trump’s ‘disinfectant’ speech. Some of that is stupidity related to ‘deep cleaning’, but, yes, Trump had an effect here.

More importantly, campaign speeches are not legal documents. Brevity combined with a little invective is part of the style, but there’s nothing to suggest Pritzker was fundamentally wrong, especially if you watched that press conference at the time. This isn’t fact checking, it’s gaslighting.

And Trump doesn’t get a mulligan simply because he can’t speak coherently.