Suzanne Harrington: Trump's autism gaffe tells us what kind of world his ilk wants to see
US President Donald Trump during a press conference with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at Chequers, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, on day two of the president's second state visit to the UK.
You know in film chase scenes when the bad guy is being pursued and is trying to obstruct his pursuers by hurling rubbish bins in their path? Throwing any old crap at them, to trip them up?
A tidy metaphor for Trump, Tylenol, and Epstein. Trump, desperate to deflect attention from all the “wonderful secrets” he shared with his paedophile pal, declared that Tylenol — paracetamol — causes autism when taken during pregnancy.
Catch, he shouted at the world’s media, hurling a burst bin bag of rotten misinformation at them — and lo, the world’s media dutifully caught it with both hands.
“Nice try — release the Epstein files” was the dream response from Tylenol.
Dream as in fantasy — turns out this fabulous riposte was fake news, along with, “We’ve mastered Quick Release. How much longer until Congress releases the Epstein files?”
Challenging presidential lies takes a lot more time and energy than uttering them.
Trump, following his former mentor Steve Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone with shit”, utters something nonsensical (singing in the shower causes dementia; eating bananas while pregnant makes your baby banana-shaped; vaccines kill) and because it’s an actual POTUS emitting this shit, it reverberates around the world.
This is followed by media coverage not on, say, the Epstein files, but on how bananas do not cause banana-shaped babies. Or paracetamol does not cause autism.
Trump and his ‘health’ secretary — someone writer Rebecca Solnit describes as the “carrion-eating ex-junkie brainworm guy” — appear to have a special aversion to autism, despite Trump having quite recently given the world’s richest autistic access all areas, with predictably disastrous results.
While Elon has gone back to funding neo-nazis elsewhere, Trump and RFK seek, like old-school eugenicists, to eliminate autism by encouraging women to avoid paracetamol during pregnancy.
What dullards. David Chambers — Blindboy — in a BBC radio interview on September 24, describes how being neurodivergent is not so much an experience of thinking outside the box, as not experiencing any box in the first place, resulting in radically free thinking, expression, creativity.
Imagine then a world without the autistic spectrum. No Michelangelo, no Leonardo, no Beethoven, no Mozart.
No Emily Dickinson, no Andy Warhol, no Tim Burton or Anthony Hopkins. No Einstein, Tesla, Darwin, Newton, Edison or Bell.
No Dan Aykroyd or Daryl Hannah, no Susan Boyle or Gary Numan. No Lionel Messi. No Carl Jung. No Greta Thunberg.
Also no Elon Musk, although we probably wouldn’t miss him too much — and by too much, I mean at all.
Trump and his goons excel at spreading medical misinformation — anti-vax, anti-paracetamol, pro-ivermectin, pro-bleach — especially when cornered about close friendships with fellow sex offenders.
But who on earth would take medical advice from these lying liars and fake-news fakers?
The day after Trump’s paracetamol pronouncement, a woman in North Carolina appeared to be livestreaming something called the rapture from her back garden.
“I’ll report if I see anybody floating upward,” she posted on TikTok. Next day she was still “reporting live” from her garden, “looking for balls of light, looking for floaters”.
She was one of hundreds of thousands Americans actively RaptureTokking.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I’d guess that the people looking for humans being sucked upwards towards the sky by invisible forces are the same people who would take medical advice from an orange sex offender.
Playing out like a fever dream, beyond the help of paracetamol.
