Donald Trump has never been the picture of mental stability, but over the last few weeks he’s appeared to crank up the crazy from about a 45 to a 337. From seemingly proposing intravenous Lysol as a coronavirus cure to claiming the United States is close to testing 5 million people a day for COVID-19—a number so completely absurd that he might as well have said we’ll soon be running 8 billion tests a day—to reportedly threatening to sue his campaign manager over a dimming 2020 outlook, the president has well and truly lost whatever remaining shred of sanity he once had on reserve.

That people have had the audacity to point out how having a full-fledged lunatic in charge of the country during an unprecedented crisis is not exactly ideal has of course not gone over well in the Oval Office, whose inhabitant believes he’s the most reasonable, compos mentis person on earth (just ask him—he’ll tell you). After claiming in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday that he simply doesn’t “believe the polls” showing his reelection prospects circling the drain, the president—who is working so hard to overcome the pandemic that he sometimes only has 10 minutes for lunch—proceeded to tuck in for roughly 12 hours of screeching in a pitch only dogs can hear, tweeting and retweeting more than 56 times on everything from “DIRTY COP JAMES COMEY” to the wisdom of forcing meatpacking plants to stay open without worker protections to a plot by Democrats to “steal” the election. Mostly, though, he trained his fire on various journalists reporting his blowup with campaign manager Brad Parscale, sounding like a guy explaining to his cellmate at the asylum that this is all a big mix-up, he was framed, and he doesn’t actually belong here.

Incidentally, the Brian Williams segment that seemed to unleash the beast referenced the president’s claim on Wednesday that the novel coronavirus, which his own officials have said will likely return in second and third waves, “is going away. I think we’re gonna come up with vaccines and all, but this is going away. It’s gonna go, it’s gonna leave, it’s gonna be gone, it’s gonna be eradicated.” Williams also touched on first son-in-law Jared Kushner’s declaration that a situation in which over 60,000 Americans have died is a “great success story.”

But it was seemingly the reference to the alleged Parscale blowup, first reported by CNN, that really chapped Trump’s hide.

So anyway, the president is clearly well beyond the point where, were he not president, he would have been dropped off by his kids at a nice facility for “some rest.” Only in this case, we’re just letting him carry on running the country.

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair

— Internal Documents Reveal Team Trump’s Chloroquine Master Plan

— Big Pharma Is Meddling in the Race for a COVID-19 Treatment

— Inside the Rise and Partial Fall of a COVID-19 Wonder Drug Stock

— Five Surprising Facts About the Novel Coronavirus

— What 1918’s “Forgotten Pandemic” Can Teach Us About Today

— From the Archive: Inside the Globalization of the Pharmaceutical Industry, a Lethal Profit Machine

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.