Joe Scarborough: “The pace of those hateful lies ebbed and flowed with the years, until they swelled recently into a slimy tsunami of bilge spewing from President Trump’s 80-million-strong Twitter feed. I have never been able to grasp Trump’s bizarre fixation with ‘Morning Joe,’ but that sad obsession has driven him to weaponize Lori’s memory in an attempt to settle some perceived grievance against me. Or perhaps to deflect from the 100,000 Americans lost to a disease he once dismissed as ‘one person coming in from China.'”

“I have been a public figure for more than 25 years, so I pay little attention to public lies. T.J. and Lori’s family, however, are innocents in this. To have the commander in chief torment a patriot like T.J. is disgusting, but sadly, not surprising. Despite the pain he endured from discredited websites and Twitter accounts, T.J. kept his peace for nearly two decades, until the most powerful man on Earth began slandering his wife’s good name.”

Washington Post: “Trump and the White House often say they turn to social media because a hostile, left-leaning news media does not depict Trump’s achievements accurately. The Fact Checker video team analyzed thousands of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube posts and ads from Trump, his campaign and a long list of surrogates. The data revealed the backbone of a five-point strategy to tell their version of the coronavirus story: rewriting mistakes, highlighting achievements, deflecting blame, declaring victory and creating distraction.”

“All presidential campaigns try to portray their candidate in the best possible light, but what is notable about the Trump campaign is that its social media reach allows the campaign to rewrite even the most recent history.”

James Hohmann: “Doing so paints a picture of the alternative reality that the president’s reelection effort is trying to create for low-information voters who don’t follow traditional news organizations.”

Rush Limbaugh explains how President Trump amplifies conspiracy theories:

Like during the campaign of 2016, I ran the gamut of emotions on this. When Trump said that he had seen a picture of Ted Cruz’s dad standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald, I said, “What the hell is this?” And I thought he’s going to have to walk this back. Ted Cruz’s dad had something to do with the assassination of JFK? He never walked it back. But more importantly, he never asserted it himself.

He simply said it was out there and that people ought to know — and with virtually every conspiracy theory that Trump touts, he doesn’t actually tout them himself. He spreads them and he — under the guise of people need to know about this, and it’s his way of jamming them up. It’s his way of teasing him. It’s his way of getting these conspiracy theories out there.

For example, as a way of illustrating, do you think — Mr. Snerdley, do you think Trump cares whether Scarborough murdered anybody or not? No, of course he doesn’t care. So why is he tweeting it? Well, because it’s out there. He didn’t make it up. It’s long been out there that this death has something suspicious about it.

So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames — and he’s having fun watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover.

Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, writes a long essay about what drives President Trump:

“Like many other Trump critics, I believed that he was driven by an insatiable narcissistic hunger to be loved, accepted, admired and praised. That remains prima facie true, but it deflects attention from what drives Trump more deeply: the need to dominate. His primary goal is to win at any cost and the end always justifies the means. Ultimately, he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks or feels. For Trump, the choice between dominating and being loved — saving himself or saving others — is no contest.”

“The catalyst for my shift came after a friend sent me a long paper written by Vince Greenwood, a Washington D.C. based psychologist. Greenwood makes a detailed clinical case that Trump is a psychopath… As I once did up close, we can observe every day which psychopathic traits Trump manifests in his behavior. The highly regarded Hare Psychopathy Checklist enumerates 20 of them. By my count Trump clearly demonstrates 16 of the traits and his overall score is far higher than the average prison inmate.”

“The trait that most distinguishes psychopaths is the utter absence of conscience — the capacity to lie, cheat, steal and inflict pain to achieve his ends without a scintilla of guilt or shame, as Trump so demonstrably does. What Trump’s words and behavior make clear is that he feels no more guilt about hurting others than a lion does about killing a giraffe.”

President Trump finally offered his condolences to the families and friends of Americans who have died from the coronavirus, a day after the country’s death toll from the virus surpassed 100,000.

Said Trump: “We have just reached a very sad milestone with the coronavirus pandemic deaths reaching 100,000. To all of the families & friends of those who have passed, I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy & love for everything that these great people stood for & represent. God be with you!”

“Marc Short, the chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, owns between $506,043 and $1.64 million worth of individual stocks in companies doing work related to the Trump administration’s pandemic response — holdings that could run afoul of conflict-of-interest laws,” NPR reports.

President Trump promoted a video on Twitter late Wednesday night that opens with Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin declaring that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” Mediaite reports.

“For President Trump, it was a chance to rewrite the story line from tragedy to triumph. Even as the United States reached the grim milestone on Wednesday of 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, he would help mark the nation’s trailblazing return to human spaceflight from American soil,” the New York Times reports.

“But Mr. Trump’s hopes of demonstrating that America was back with the verve of a rocket’s red glare were doused by lightning-filled storm clouds that forced flight controllers to scrub the long-awaited launch of the SpaceX rocket even as the president watched helplessly from the Kennedy Space Center.”

“Only minutes after heralding what was to be the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade, a disappointed Mr. Trump scrapped planned remarks and made a hasty retreat to Air Force One to fly back to Washington and the misery of the health crisis. Still, just as the country’s reopening after months of lockdown proceeds with fits and starts, Mr. Trump vowed not to give up, promising to return this weekend when the launch will be tried again.”

“President Trump has spent his life in thrall to numbers — his wealth, his ratings, his polls. Even during the deadly coronavirus pandemic, he has remained fixated on certain metrics — peppering aides about infection statistics, favoring rosy projections and obsessing over the gyrating stock market,” the Washington Post reports.

“But as the nation reached a bleak milestone this week — 100,000 Americans dead from the novel coronavirus — Trump has been uncharacteristically silent. His public schedule this week contains no special commemoration, no moment of silence, no collective sharing of grief.”

Despite a wave of condemnation from conservative editorial pages, President Trump continues tweeting about baseless conspiracy theories about “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough this morning.

Mitt Romney: “I know Joe Scarborough. Joe is a friend of mine. I don’t know T.J. Klausutis. Joe can weather vile, baseless accusations but T.J.? His heart is breaking. Enough already.”

New York Post editorial: “There is a difference between mocking someone’s ratings and hurting an innocent family with the memories of their tragic daughter because of a petty feud… Is that really the president you want to be, sir? The president for whom people disregard half or even most of what you say as irrelevant?”

Washington Examiner editorial: “Whatever his issues with Scarborough, President Trump’s crazed Twitter rant on this subject was vile and unworthy of his office. Some will undoubtedly shrug it off as Trump being Trump, but one could hardly be blamed for reading it and doubting his fitness to lead.”

“To say Trump owes Scarborough an apology is to put it mildly. But in the end, Scarborough won’t be the one hurt by this. Against a weak opponent, Trump somehow managed in 2016 to win despite carrying on with sad, deluded conspiracy theories about Sen. Ted Cruz’s father being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Against a less reviled opponent, he may not be so lucky in 2020.”

“And observers might even someday look back at this incident as the instant when things began to unravel.”

Wall Street Journal editorial: “Donald Trump sometimes traffics in conspiracy theories—recall his innuendo in 2016 about Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination—but his latest accusation against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is ugly even for him. Mr. Trump has been tweeting the suggestion that Mr. Scarborough might have had something to do with the death in 2001 of a young woman who worked in his Florida office when Mr. Scarborough was a GOP Congressman…”

“There’s no evidence of foul play, or an affair with the woman, and the local coroner ruled that the woman fainted from an undiagnosed heart condition and died of head trauma. Some on the web are positing a conspiracy because the coroner had left a previous job under a cloud, but the parents and husband of the young woman accepted the coroner’s findings and want the case to stay closed…”

“We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.”

Joe Biden called President Trump an “absolute fool” for stoking controversy around the use of masks, Politico reports.

Said Biden: “I mean every leading doc in the world is saying you should wear a mask when you’re in a crowd, and especially when you know you’re going to be in a position where you’re going to inadvertently get closer than 12 feet to somebody.”

He also accused Trump of caving to “macho stuff,” the argument advanced by some opposed to wearing masks that doing so is a sign of weakness.

“Twitter on Tuesday slapped a fact-check label on President Trump’s tweets for the first time, a response to long-standing criticism that the company is too hands-off when it comes to policing misinformation and falsehoods from world leaders,” the Washington Post reports.

“The move, which escalates tensions between Washington and Silicon Valley in an election year, was made in response to two Trump tweets over the past 24 hours. The tweets falsely claimed that mail-in ballots are fraudulent.”

Peter Wehner: “Donald Trump doesn’t merely want to criticize his opponents; he takes a depraved delight in inflicting pain on others, even if there’s collateral damage in the process, as is the case with the Klausutis family. There’s something quite sick about it all.”

“A lot of human casualties result from the cruelty of malignant narcissists like Donald Trump—casualties, it should be said, that his supporters in the Republican Party, on various pro-Trump websites and news outlets, and on talk radio are willing to tolerate or even defend. Their philosophy seems to be that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. If putting up with Trump’s indecency is the price of maintaining power, so be it…”

“But whatever the political ramifications of this current lie being promulgated by the president, the rest of us need to name it, and to make Trump supporters own it. They are his, and he is theirs.”

President Trump mused about whether he should use insulin while making remarks on protecting seniors with diabetes from the coronavirus.

Said Trump: “I don’t use insulin. Should I be? Huh? I never thought about it. But I know a lot of people are very badly affected, right? Unbelievable.”