top medical advisers insisted his remarks were misinterpreted.
After several days in which state public health officials have rushed to issue urgent warnings to Americans about the dangers of ingesting disinfectants, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, sidestepped the opportunity to amplify that message Sunday.
Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper what the American people should know about disinfectants and the human body, she instead defended the President's tendency to muse aloud about his ideas as he processes new information, and suggested that the media had missed the point of the White House presentation.
Birx noted that when Trump made the remark Thursday, he was engaged in a "dialogue" with William Bryan, the acting head of science at the Department of Homeland Security, about a study detailing the use of light and disinfectants to help kill the coronavirus on surfaces.
"I think I've made it clear that this was a musing, as you described," Birx told Tapper on "State of the
Union" Sunday, dodging a question about whether she's bothered by having to spend time discussing the President's comments, by criticizing "the news cycle."
"I think we're missing the bigger pieces of what we need to be doing as an American people to continue to protect one another," Birx said. "We should be having that dialogue about asymptomatics.
We should be having that dialogue about this unique clotting that we're seeing."
Bruised by the avalanche of negative coverage and reprimands from public health experts, Trump retreated into the recesses of the White House this weekend, emerging only on Twitter where he aired his grievances about his press coverage.
He took no questions at his briefing Friday and in a departure from recent weeks, there was no White House press conference Saturday and none scheduled so far for Sunday.
The President's absence from the podium may be the best medicine for Americans at a time when some states are beginning to reopen and residents are looking for guidance from scientists and medical experts about whether it is safe to venture from their homes.
For weeks now as aides and allies have urged Trump to stop doing daily briefings, the President has commandeered the microphone, dispensing self-congratulatory assessments of his administration's handling of the pandemic rifled with inaccuracies.
He has downplayed the desperate shortages in personal protective equipment and Covid-19 testing equipment. He has railed at state officials who don't seem sufficiently grateful to him and snapped at reporters for "nasty questions" and unflattering news coverage.
Instead of focusing on scientific guidance from doctors and experts, under Trump's control have been more political than informative, often taking on the braggadocios tone of the President's rallies.
The imbalance of self-promotion and facts has led to worries among Democrats about the fact that former Vice President Joe Biden, his presumptive Democratic rival, has no equivalent platform.
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