This reporter's reaction to interviewing Trump has become the ultimate meme
Interviewing Donald Trump is a job and a half and sometimes, you can’t help but make a few faces and those faces then become a viral meme.
That’s exactly what happened to Jonathan Swan who has become an overnight Internet star for reacting to the president's many one-liners.
Trump got astonishingly confused by coronavirus death rates and statistics in an interview on Monday as he declared that the US was “lower than the world” regarding coronavirus data.
He also bizarrely suggested that South Korea's figures were so low because they are faking their statistics. It was all so absurd that people could not help but wonder if the HBO interview was actually a very clever parody.
Viewers at home were baffled and very confused at these moments and Swan was forced to clarify he was asking about death as a proportion of the population, not death as a proportion of cases.
Although many people didn’t find Trump’s failings funny they found humour in the fact that Swan seemed to try, yet fail, to keep his composure during the ordeal.
Maybe Swan, like the rest of us, wondered if this was a joke. Well, we are sad to confirm that this was indeed real life. Sorry about that.
At one point in the chat, it appeared like Trump suggested that South Korea has been “faking” their statistics. When asked to clarify, Trump refused.
Trump said:
I won't get into that because we have a very good relationship with the country. But you don't know that. And they have spikes.
Their chat then shifted so they could talk about the fact America currently does more testing than other countries, which Trump blamed as the reason behind the US reporting many coronavirus cases.
Trump asked:
Don't we get credit for that?
Later adding, “Death is way down from where it was” and claims that "Where it was is much higher than where it is right now.”
Swan interrupted to add “it went down then it went up again.”
Remaining very adamant Trump added:
But now it's going down again. It's going down in Arizona. It's going down in Florida. It's going down in Texas.
In disbelief, Swan said: “It's going down in Florida?”
Just to put out there, Florida has been among the states to have experienced a shocking and sudden spike in coronavirus cases after the state reopened. But according to Trump, this isn’t the case:
Yeah it levelled out and it's going down, that's my report as of yesterday.
The Tampa Bay Times reported that on Monday that Florida saw the lowest number of daily infections reported since mid-June and about half the average number of new positive infections reported daily from the prior week.
The Florida Department of Health reported Monday that 4,752 people had tested positive for COVID-19 in the state, bringing the total number of cases in the state to 491,884.