Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump has been a disturbingly erratic figure, one who began by dismissing the danger outright, then continually lying about the preparedness of the country to meet this medical crisis as the infections rose and deaths mounted. Even as governors around the country complained about the lack of resources and pleaded for the federal government to come to their aid, the president and his top advisers continued to claim that everything was perfectly under control.

As recently as March 7, when asked by a reporter if he was worried about the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, Trump responded: “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it.” A few days later, he doubled down on that optimistic assessment: “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

And as many people around the country found it impossible to be tested for the coronavirus, even those displaying clear symptoms of COVID-19, the president stated flatly: “Anybody that needs a test gets a test. We—they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.”

It’s a performance that has stunned most medical professionals and many former government officials who have served in previous administrations during times of similar crisis. “The U.S. response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” said Ron Klain, who served under President Obama as the leader of a task force responding to the Ebola crisis in 2014 and 2015, at a Georgetown University panel recently. “What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.” (As of Sunday, there have been 135,000 confirmed cases reported in the United States and 2,730 deaths.)

But this weekend was one in which the president really seemed to go off the rails.

It began late Saturday afternoon with a casual comment to reporters as he left the White House, holding an umbrella to shield himself from light rain. He said that he was considering a total quarantine of the New York area, barring people from that state (as well as “probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut”), from traveling to any other part of the country. He particularly singled out Florida, which the president recently claimed as his legal residence. “They’re having problems down in Florida,” he said. “A lot of New Yorkers are going down. We don’t want that.”