What's the Most Insane Thing You've Ever Seen? Is It This Now?

A mere 24 hours ago, I thought I had seen something truly insane: Trump, ill with coronavirus, leaving the hospital to greet his supporters from the presidential motorcade.

Was I ever so young?

Only now are we getting to the hardcore stuff. On Monday evening, after Trump was discharged from Walter Reed, the still-very-infectious president landed at the White House on Marine One, climbed the South Portico steps to the balcony, TOOK OFF HIS MASK, gave a thumbs up, and proceeded to enter the White House, maskless, where his aides awaited him. While delivering this carefully choreographed performance, Trump was visibly out of breath, and appeared at times to be wincing in pain.

But even that wasn’t as insane as the video Trump tweeted moments later, a very flattering edit of the above sequence of events set to swelling music.

The Trump team is clearly working around the clock to spin the president’s covid diagnosis—which is potentially rather dire and could still get much worse—into an inspiring hero’s journey.

On Monday afternoon, campaign spokesperson Erin Perrine insisted that, actually, Trump catching the virus is good because now he has “experience … fighting the virus as an individual” that Joe Biden lacks.

And when he announced he would be leaving Walter Reed a few hours later, Trump urged people not to be afraid of coronavirus or let it “dominate” their lives, despite the virus killing more than 200,000 Americans. “We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge,” he tweeted. “I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”

For now, this is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen. But there’s always tomorrow.