Another terrible slap at the press today from the T-Rump during his now-daily COVID-19 circus events. Called out for his bullshit, he goes mental in anger. The following video is Fox News, sorry (CNN is here):

Just about every episode of these update/rallies has at least one encounter with a direct question, usually voiced in his own words — via Mediaite late this afternoon:

President Donald Trump continued on Monday what is becoming a tradition at his daily coronavirus press conference: lacing into White House reporters.
At his Monday presser in the Rose Garden, Trump selected CNN’s Jim Acosta for a question.
The CNN senior White House correspondent asked Trump about his previous comments downplaying the threat of the coronavirus.

“What do you say to Americans who believe that you got this wrong?” Acosta asked.

Trump defended his past statements, claiming they were “all true” and the product of his efforts to “keep the country calm.”
The president then dropped an odd claim: “I don’t want panic in the country. I could cause panic much better than even you. I would make you look like a minor league player. But you know what? I don’t want to do that. I want to have our country be calm and strong and fight and win and it will go away.”

Trump then started attacking CNN for Acosta’s question, which he deemed “nasty” and “snarky.” (He would, later in the press conference, call a question from PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor as “snarky” as well.)

This was sort-of what Acosta was referencing:

The trump campaign sent a cease and desist letter to Priorities USA for this ad. So I’m retweeting it. pic.twitter.com/0Q1QO9TeQT

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) March 26, 2020

Background from Bess Levin at Vanity Fair and the T-Rump’s blubbering before the festivities in the Rose Garden:

On Monday, Donald Trump kicked off the week with a near-hour-long interview with his pals at Fox & Friends, and if you were worried that exposure to the disease had filled his bloodstream with antibodies that bring about reason, sense, and the ability to stay lucid, worry not.
…
Asked by cohost Brian Kilmeade about a Washington Post editorial condemning Russia and China for spreading absurd misinformation about the virus — including, in the case of Russia, that it was made by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and in the case of China, that it had been let loose on Wuhan by the U.S. Army — Trump responded, “Number one, you don’t know what they’re doing. And when you read it in the Washington Post, you don’t believe it. I believe very little when I see it. I see stories in the Washington Post that are so fake, that are so phony. I have stories that are such fake stuff, and that’s number one.”

Then he added, of governments spreading completely outrageous lies: “They do it and we do it…Every country does it.”

Trump later returned to the conspiracy he pushed throughout January, February, and a not-insignificant portion of March: that the press’s reporting on COVID-19 is singularly focused on taking him down.

“They will do anything they can to hurt this presidency, and yet here we are with the best numbers we’ve ever had,” Trump moaned, apparently more concerned with his approval numbers than the number of Americans who’ve died from the virus.
“I don’t even understand it when you can get such fake news from—New York Times is a totally dishonest paper, they’re dishonest people. Washington Post, same thing. I’m trying to figure out for three and a half years, who is more dishonest, who is more corrupt? The Washington Post or the New York Times? When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. We’ll have a special.”

Elsewhere during the show, Trump did not take kindly to a question about Nancy Pelosi’s comment that his initial, well-documented “denial” of the crisis was proving deadly.

“Look, she’s a sick puppy, in my opinion,” Trump said of the Speaker of the House.
“She really is. She’s got a lot of problems.… Don’t forget, she was playing the impeachment game. Her game where she ended up looking like a fool. She was doing nothing but—all she did for the first long time was impeach, impeach. This went on for years, I mean, if you think about it. That’s all she did. She didn’t do anything.”
(Actually, if you “think” about it, the whole impeachment thing went on for a matter of months, but sure, what is time anyway?)

A near-perfect asshole of a cretin, and to any rational person, continually ‘looking like a fool.’

The way-major problem here is the T-Rump’s total domination of the coronavirus pandemic — he’s full-on TV every day, babbling his zero-cents worth about a extremely-serious matter, and can’t stand to be questioned at all about anything of substance. And any past remark, or action. If he doesn’t outright deny it, he slaps at the reporter for even to dare pose the question, and mostly talks around whatever the subject.
A most-horrid question is why is the T-Rump such a shithead about people’s lives?
The end-game might be way-bad — via NPR this morning:

The nationalist government in Hungary passed a law Monday granting sweeping emergency powers that Prime Minister Viktor Orban says are necessary to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Those powers include sidelining parliament and giving Orban the power to rule by decree indefinitely.
The law would punish those who spread false information about the pandemic with up to five years in prison.

“Changing our lives is now unavoidable,” Orban told lawmakers last week.
“Everyone has to leave their comfort zone. This law gives the government the power and means to defend Hungary.”

During Monday’s vote, he said: “When this emergency ends, we will give back all powers, without exception.”
…
Kim Lane Scheppele, a Hungary expert at Princeton University, says Orban has stretched the law like no one else.
“Bolsanaro in Brazil, Kaczynski in Poland … Trump in the United States, all of them have thought about using emergency powers. But no one has yet gone as far as Orban to really shut down democracy as anybody knew it in Hungary before,” she says.
Orban is popular with Hungarians, but even supporters of his Fidesz party are concerned about the country’s health care system, says Gabor Gyori, a political analyst with Policy Solutions, a left-leaning think tank in Budapest.
“The irony is that the government is giving itself extreme powers,”
he says, but “it is not taking any extreme measures” when it comes to combating the coronavirus.

Are we headed in that direction?
Shit-on-a-stick…

(Illustration by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here).