The president of the United States went fully off the rails on live television yesterday like your shouty right-wing uncle at the Thanksgiving table … times a thousand zillion infinities. Even for Donald Trump, who has set the bar for presidential behavior so low that worms use it as a guardrail, this was a rare and terrifying performance.

Trump has been hijacking the daily coronavirus briefings to strut, preen, lie, attack and generally indulge himself in being the gibberish fountain he is at his infamous nonsense rallies. It is cathartic for him, I assume, to bellow falsehoods and receive gusts of cheering adulation in response, so — now that his in-person rallies are on hold — he’s made that behavior the centerpiece of daily briefings regarding a pandemic that has killed nearly 24,000 of his citizens.

On Monday, Trump took it up (or down) several dozen notches by playing a video made at taxpayer expense showing that he is always right and everyone else is always wrong, so there. Specifically, the video was a hatchet job on history, meant to show that Trump’s lethally incompetent response to the pandemic was in fact a brilliant series of chess moves that only terrible Democrats and the “fake news” disagree with.