Trump berates media at jaw-dropping instruction

On Monday early morning I had a shipment to my house from the nearby off-licence – or alcohol shop, as they state over here.

And I put a jokey photo on Twitter of a bottle of gin and 8 bottles of tonic, with the caption that a minimum of I had the next week arranged.

After leaving the White Home Rundown Room on Monday evening following a marathon two-hour 24- minute interview, I felt I could have knocked off the whole lot in one sitting.

This has actually been the most dizzying, jaw-dropping, eyeball-popping, head-spinning news conference I have actually ever gone to. And I was at Bill Clinton’s news conference in 1998 when he faced the press for the first time over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

I was at this president’s first White Home gathering when he called me “another appeal”. I was in Helsinki when he had his first news conference with Vladimir Putin, and seemed to prefer to believe the Russian leader over his own security and intelligence chiefs on interference in the 2016 election.

I was in Vietnam when Mr Trump offered a press conference after his talks with Kim Jong-un had unceremoniously collapsed. So I’ve attended some corkers.

What made last night’s encounter unique was the context. And secondly, this was, if you like, a distillation – all the talk of gin, I believe, required me to use that word – in one news conference of what three and a half years of Donald Trump has been like to cover.

There are more than 23,000 Americans dead since of coronavirus and over half a million contaminated – and bear in mind that, in early March, Donald Trump was saying there were a handful of cases, however that would quickly be down to absolutely no.

Yet Donald Trump strolled into the instruction room with ratings to settle with the media. This wasn’t about the dead, the desperately ill, individuals fearful of capturing the infection. This had to do with him. And more particularly his extensive sense of grievance that the media has been critical of his handling of Covid-19

If you think that is an unreasonable exaggeration, after a few moments he said he was going to play a video. It had actually been produced by White Home personnel, even though it bore all the trademarks of a campaign