The president's near-daily appearances at White House briefings, which are ostensibly about the coronavirus pandemic, have clearly become a replacement for the rapturous, rambling rallies Trump relies on to feed his ego. As Stephen Colbert noted in Tuesday night's from-home monologue, his presence there has gone from less-than-useful to actively alarming — and the campaign-rally parallels are rising. Tuesday's "briefing" went for a wildly uninformative, distinctly MAGA-rally-esque two hours and 24 minutes.
"It was like watching The Irishman but with only one unconvincingly de-aged criminal," joked Colbert.
And the parallels don't end there. Trump began the session by showing assembled reporters a video trying to spin the administration's well-documented months of inaction on the looming pandemic — which has now taken over 25,000 American lives — as months of them totally taking it very seriously, actually.
"It's like if the fireman showed up to your burning house," Colbert explained, "and instead of picking up a hose he said 'Wow, this inferno is the perfect backdrop to my one-man show about how it's not my fault your house is burning down.'"
Topics Donald Trump Politics COVID-19
