I take it all back. I regularly mock British politicians for their lies and hypocrisy, not least Boris Johnson, the UK’s Donald Trump-lite, who only last Friday had hit a new low for cronyism, corruption and nepotism with his appointments to the House of Lords.
But all this was amateur hour compared with Donald Trump’s interview with Axios’s political correspondent, Jonathan Swan, that was broadcast on HBO on Monday evening.
Here we had the US president in not just a stream but a full torrent of subconsciousness. Incoherent, deluded, out of his depth. An object lesson in unchecked, X-rated narcissism. The only wonder was that Swan managed to keep a reasonably straight face throughout the best part of 40 minutes.
Swan began by asking whether the president’s positive thinking had necessarily been the right approach to the coronavirus when the US death toll was now past 150,000 – and rising.
Cue a long rant from Trump about how there had been nothing like this since the…
