CNN’s Anderson Cooper opened his show on Tuesday night with a long monologue skewering President Donald Trump for reteweeting a Covid-19 conspiracy theorist and then fleeing the White House press briefing when confronted over some of the false claims he had sent to his 84 million followers.

“Yes, the president can occasionally read remarks written by someone else on a TelePrompTer that makes him sound responsible which he did again this evening,” Cooper noted, before alluding to the president’s late-night hyrdoxychloroquine Twitter binge promoting false and dubious claims. “But 149,000 Americans are dead, which this self-proclaimed wartime president again did not mention in his prepared remarks he was reading off the paper. And like a snake oil salesman, he’s promoting disproven medical treatments. It is unconscionable. Whose medical advice is the president of the United States promoting? It’s not Dr. [Anthony] Fauci. Not Dr. [Deborah] Birx, in the Dr. [Robert] Redfield from the CDC or surgeon general begging people to wear masks. No, the president is promoting a doctor whose viral video has been very popular suddenly among QAnon conspiracy theorists and Covid deniers. She’s a doctor in Houston that believes women can be impregnated by witches in their dreams.”

After playing a clip of the doctor purporting to explain how witches can have “astral sex” with people from a distance, Cooper waited a beat to let the absurdity of her beliefs sink in. The woman appeared outside the Capitol yesterday at an event organized by the Tea Party Patriots, where she dismissed mask wearing and clinical studies and falsely claimed hydroxychloroquine was a “cure” for the coronavirus. Video of her viral rant made its way onto Trump’s timeline hours later, before it was deleted by Twitter for spreading misinformation about the pandemic.

“Keeping them honest, just medically, that simply is not true,” Cooper emphasized. “The most recent study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, which is a very, very reputable medical journal, was done on 504 patients and showed no benefit and revealed heart rhythm complications that could be deadly. Other studies agree and the FDA has revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine. The FDA has done that. President Trump’s FDA. And chloroquine for the treatment of Covid-19. One study which differs and often sited by the president has come at a criticism for being of a lower quality than the others, but in truth, with tens of thousands of lives on the line not to mention the distraction for the public health system in the U.S. which is stockpiling this drug, the war-time president, so-called war-time president’s authority seems to be this person and himself and that’s not our assessment, it is by his own admission.”

Cooper then circled back to Trump’s press briefing earlier in the day, where CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins confronted the president for promoting the conspiracy theorist’s baseless and reckless claims. After Trump declared the woman “an important voice” he quickly backtracked in the same breath to saying “I know nothing about her” when Collins pointed out some of her other wacky and clearly unscientific assertions.

“Ah, he wan out of the woom,” Cooper said, in a mocking, baby voice of Trump. “‘Too many questions! Not questions I wanted! I’m going to leave!’ That was that. No more questions.” The CNN host then reminded viewers that, just a few weeks ago, Trump retweeted former game show host Chuck Woolery’s baseless conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. Woolery has since revealed his son has the virus and deactivated his popular Twitter account.

“What were the former game host’s medical qualifications to backup the warning and not trust the experts? He sells ointment,” Cooper pointed out, before running one of Woolery’s ads for a product called blue emu oil. “With the death toll up to past 150,000, the President of the United States is back at it even though he admitted this past weekend retweeting has not been good for him.”

“With all due respect to the office, no, Mr. President, they get the people you serve in trouble and cost some of them their lives.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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