It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Tuesday, April 28th.

The increasingly erratic President Trump was back at the podium for another news conference last night

after saying over

the weekend that he was done with daily coronavirus briefings. That, of course, came after his

embarrassing and dangerous musing on Thursday about injecting people with disinfectant.

Listeners, I hope you at least got to see some of the comedy about that online, like the made-up

advertisement for new Clorox Chewables.

Just to be clear, there is no such thing as Clorox chewables.

You can die if you ingest any kind of Clorox, but the president gave a humor-hungry world,

a big-fat opportunity to mock him even as they cringe.

Princeton History Professor Julian Zelizer is thinking about this year's presidential election

as kind of like the ones in 1980 and 1932.

In those elections, the incumbent presidents running free election were judged by the American

people to simply be not up to the crises the

country faced at that time. Jimmy Carter with the Iran hostage crisis losing to Ronald Reagan

and Herbert Hoover with the Great Depression losing to FBI. Now that's not a prediction that

President Trump will lose this year, but it is a historical

comparison for what the central question of this election year is shaping up to be.

In a CNN commentary posted this weekend, Zellezer writes, it might just be that the best

thing Joe Biden can do right now is to lay low and let the president self-destruct. The more that Trump says

about the crisis, the worse he looks, writes Julian Zelizer, Princeton University history and

...