Rick Wilson: Trump’s COVID-19 briefing was a ‘success’ only because he ‘didn’t poop his diaper’

President Donald Trump tried to fake his way through a briefing on the deadly coronavirus pandemic, Rick Wilson says -- but he came across as "a D-grade actor might in a straight-to-video flick."

The White House and campaign staff put the president in front of the cameras to reset weeks of self-inflicted damage to his re-election chances, but the former Republican strategist said in a new Daily Beast column that the effort was doomed to failure.

"It was not," Wilson wrote, "a press conference with much sizzle or, for that matter, steak. Trump seemed a bit lost, even when grinding his stolid way through the scripted portions of his performance. It was less his usual edge of fury and contempt, and more 'I didn’t poop my diaper, Mommy.'"

Trump is trying to undo the disastrous health consequences -- and resulting political blowback -- that his objection to masks has wrought, and Wilson said that would work only on his most credulous supporters.

"Mark my words," Wilson wrote. "The same Trump fanatics who spat on masks as a sign of capitulation to libtard cuck shill Soros antifa mind control last week will bob their slack jaws up and down when Trumps says something to the effect of “I invented the mask. No one had ever heard about masks before me, and when I invented masks, everyone said, ‘Sir. Sir. These masks are a miracle and you’ve saved us all, sir.’"

But, of course, the president delivered one moment of "weirdness" that overshadowed anything credible and responsible he might have said about the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, when he wished former associate Ghislaine Maxwell well in her child sex trafficking case.

“'I wish her well' could be code for 'I have a vague memory of her in a room with tweens,'" Wilson wrote, "or it could mean 'Keep it shut and you might get relief. Otherwise, Bill Barr has been known to take care of problems for me'"