President Donald Trump appeared to doze during a press conference on Thursday, drawing both mockery and shock from political analysts.
In a conversation about it on Friday, however, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace simply burst into laughter.
The discussion began with NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard delicately trying to dance around Trump's history of public snoozing.
"We know the president has, uh, has a history now of, Nicolle, not — we do see the president a lot more than most presidents in the past. And there have been moments in the past, including during his hush-money payment trial in New York, in which we know there were moments in which he was appearing to fall asleep as well here," Hillyard said.
"The images sometimes play out in ways that the American public are able to capture," he continued before giving props to photographers who witness such moments and bring them to the world.
"Was he, dare I say, low energy?" asked Wallace, calling back to one of Trump's favorite attacks on former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL).
"If Joe Biden yawned on a 30-hour flight, Fox News would cut out all their breaks for a week and stay in wall-to-wall coverage about the presidential yawn," Wallace continued.
She then pivoted to talk about the man who collapsed during the press event and Trump's strange reaction that sparked its own conversation about Trump's cognition as he stared blankly into space.
"This is someone who's got some dissonance where a person —I mean, we're New Yorkers. If someone trips in a crosswalk, traffic stops in both directions, not only until the person is up, until all their belongings are back in their hands, but until an ambulance is called or a friend is called," Wallace continued. "I mean, a human reaction in the middle of a busy city is to help someone who collapses. This is the Oval Office! He's the president of the United States! He's serving in that capacity, in that meeting as a host, and he stands there!"
"That is a real deterioration in his synapses from Trump 1.0," she added.
Rev. Al Sharpton noted that Trump "went to sleep at a public function. We're not talking about Joe Biden in private. We're talking about a public function that he was hosting in the Oval Office and he went to sleep while people were speaking about national policy. He went to sleep! And obviously, they all seem to, around him, know he would do it because no one even kind of nudged, and played, like, wake him up. They're used to this! He slept through — people are speaking!"
Wallace burst into laughter, noting that it would be the cover of the New York Post and the headline would be something to the effect of "Too Old to Stay Awake for whatever this meeting is."
It prompted her to wonder, "Why don't they care that he's either too tired to do the job?" She also noted that the people around him clearly control every piece of the press, so "why is the camera still in there?"
