Trump’s alternative world:

More than 1,500 people in the US died from the coronavirus on Monday, bringing America’s death toll to nearly 43,000, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at President Donald Trump’s tweets Tuesday morning.

In a string of posts that began a bit after 6 am Eastern time, Trump lambasted MSNBC in particular, and the “Lamestream Media” in general, ghoulishly bragged about his “great ‘ratings’” during daily press briefings ostensibly about a pandemic, fudged polling numbers to inflate his popularity, and promised to bail out the US energy industry. To close out the morning, he retweeted posts from someone with the handle @SexCounseling.

It’s interesting that he doesn’t even have the self-interested smarts to realize that his preening vanity at this moment in history doesn’t look great. He has no censor, no filter, no inner inspector who checks his thoughts before he spits them out.

The president’s only reference to the coronavirus was to brag in passing about the purportedly great job he’s doing handling it. He didn’t have a single word to say to Americans with loved ones who are ill or who have died, or who are worried about getting sick themselves.

He never does. I suppose if he tried we wouldn’t believe him…but all the same it’s disgusting that he doesn’t try. Disgusting and weird and unfathomable.

Trump’s tweets are certainly not reflective of a well-adjusted adult operating with a basic sense of empathy for others. They’re ugly, and it’s tempting to ignore them. It’d be easier to do that if there [were] a presidency going on beyond the tweets. But in Trump’s case there really isn’t.

There isn’t a presidency and there isn’t even a decent human being – there’s only a kind of howling tornado of vanity and rage.