Even though that president walked back his Thursday comments on Friday by insisting he was being "sarcastic" right back at what he termed "sarcastic questions" from the press, that didn't stop some of his biggest backers from making excuses for him and searching for anything they could find online to validate his statements.
"For once, President Donald Trump’s latest tossed-out suggestion for a way to combat coronavirus — injecting ultraviolet rays — did not originate from a Fox News guest, a viral Twitter thread, or an article on a conservative website," Politico's Tina Nguyen wrote. "Instead, the process worked in reverse. First, Trump offered a muddled but hopeful theory — that one could somehow insert light or medicine into the lungs — and conservative and Trump-friendly media outlets started trying to explain and boost it. They flagged obscure research papers and said the president was simply attempting to raise the country’s spirits. They tried to discredit mainstream media coverage of the comments."
According to Brietbart.com's Joel Pollak, Trump never said "injection" as part of a "fact-check" defense -- only to see his embarrassed editors apologize and re-label his work an "opinion piece."
Pollak was not the only one to run to the president's rescue.
"In addition to the Breitbart article, other Trump-supporting personalities like Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams started elevating articles about dubious technologies and press releases about new inventions that had yet to be backed by research," Nguyen continued. "Adams and several other right-wing personalities floated the possibility that Trump had read a press release from Aytu Bioscience, a publicly-traded biotech company based out of Colorado, announcing a partnership with Cedars-Sinai, a top medical research center, to work on a therapy that involved treating coronavirus patients via injecting UV-A rays, a subspectrum of ultraviolet lights, into the lungs via a catheter tube."
Unfortunately for Adams, a spokesperson for Cedars-Sinai stated the "technology was in the pre-clinical phase: 'The technology has not been tested or used on patients.'"
According to Jack Posobiec, a correspondent with Trump favorite OANN who also helped promote the debunked "Pizzagate" smear against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump was trying to buck up depressed American trapped in their homes.
“The majority of MAGA knows he is talking about hopes for new treatments for the virus. I’m not a doctor myself so the only thing I self-medicate with is memes,” Posobiec attempted.
"Jim Hanson, a Trump-friendly commentator and the president of the right-wing think tank Security Studies Group, said there that Trump’s observers across the political spectrum are constantly engaged in this type of Trump kremlinology," the reports states with Hanson suggesting, “He's going to say some things that are a little bit off the cuff, you know, or beyond the cuff. So I'd think people try to figure it out and cover for him and say, well this is what he may have met. This is what he may be trying to say.”
Hanson then attempted to defend the president by claiming, "The idea of him up front on live TV spitballing ideas, taking pot shots at people and making sure that nobody feels too comfortable in a situation where everybody needs to be on their a game, is a leadership style that I have seen be very effective in crisis."
“That's his style. He's been that way forever. And a lot of people hate it,” continued Hanson. “Okay. I get that. It's not the old-school presidential style, but it's him, and I think the idea that a bunch of people are confused and think Trump's a doctor or a scientist, and the pronouncements that come out of his mouth are prescriptions that they should follow, is absurd."
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