Journalist's gobsmacked reactions during Trump interview are Twitter's too

"Basically my face in response to everything in 2020."
By Sam Haysom  on 

Another day, another nightmarish Donald Trump interview.

Fresh from a chat with Fox News host Chris Wallace that didn't exactly paint him in a great light, the president decided to sit down opposite Axios journalist Jonathan Swan on Monday — and, lo and behold, things were even worse this time around.

Not only did Trump double down on his well-wishes for accused child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, he also attempted to explain away the horrendous U.S. coronavirus death toll with some more charts that not even he appeared to fully understand.

Sitting opposite him, meanwhile, was Axios journalist Jonathan Swan, whose reactions were nothing short of gobsmacked throughout the interview.

Yep. If a picture says a thousand words, Swan's facial expressions during the interview pretty much told a full-length novel.

And people were quick to pick up on it.

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Swan didn't hold back on his reactions throughout the 40-minute interview, but there were a couple of moments where his bafflement went into overdrive. The image above, for instance, is from the aforementioned coronavirus chart exchange, shortly after the president assured Swan that the U.S. was "lower than the world" before thrusting a supposedly supporting chart at him.

"Oh, you're doing death as a proportion of cases," says Swan in that clip. "I'm talking about death as a proportion of population — that's where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc."

"Well you can't do that," responds Trump, prompting yet another of Swan's confused expressions.

Then, the moment became bigger than Swan's personal reactions and became Twitter's own.

Swan, for what it's worth, is more than just a baffled face. As well as being a political reporter who's covered Trump's presidency from the start, he's also the son of physician and medical commentator Dr. Norman Swan, who's been one of Australia's go-to medical experts during the coronavirus pandemic.

You can watch the full interview between Swan and Trump below.

Genuinely scary stuff.

Related Video: How to recognize and avoid fake news

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Sam Haysom

Sam Haysom is the Deputy UK Editor for Mashable. He covers entertainment and online culture, and writes horror fiction in his spare time.


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