Ricky Gervais Made Scary Prediction in 2016 About Donald Trump’s Disinfectant Comment

A four-year-old tweet from Ricky Gervais has been making the rounds again after it seemingly predicted recent current events. Though Gervais tweeted it in March of 2016, months before Donald Trump ended up being elected president, The Daily Mail noticed that some recent remarks from the president have called attention to it once again.

“The fact that there are warnings like ‘Do not drink’ on bottles of bleach makes me realize that Donald Trump can become president,” the comedian tweeted at the time. It comes across as particularly prescient now given the recent controversy that erupted after Trump suggested using disinfectants to combat coronavirus. On April 23, the president was joined by Homeland Security’s William Bryan at a coronavirus briefing who told reporters that light from the sun was a “powerful” method of killing the virus. After Bryan also mentioned that disinfectants are effective on surfaces, Trump offered up his own prognosis.

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said, following Bryan’s comments. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you are going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you could do either through the skin or in some other way. I think you said that you are going to test that, too.”

“And then I saw the disinfectant, where 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 continued. “As you see it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.” Bryan later did clarify that cleaning lungs with a disinfectant isn’t possible, though Trump still replied: “maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work.”

Following Trump’s comments, New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene received more than twice the amount of calls from “exposure” to both Lysol and other household cleaners. After resounding criticism over the president’s comments, he replied on Friday that he was simply being sarcastic.

“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters just like you, just to see what would happen,” Trump told NBC News. “I was asking a sarcastic and a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside.” He still claimed that “it does kill it and it would kill it on the hands, and it would make things much better.”