Of the many ways Donald Trump has embarrassed himself over the years, what could have easily been in the Top 10 of All-Time single most mortifying moments of his presidency unfortunately — for all of us — never came to fruition.
On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel shared that, in an effort to prove that no amount of deadly virus pumping through his veins would ever be enough to take him down, Trump had planned a hokey stunt for when he left Walter Reed Medical Center in early October 2020 after being hospitalized with COVID: disrobing to reveal that he was Superman. As Kimmel explained:
Remember a couple of years ago, after Typhoid Donny was discharged from the hospital for COVID — when he had COVID? He said he wanted to open up his shirt like Clark Kent to reveal the Superman. Well, according to [Maggie] Haberman’s book, he didn’t just mean that figuratively.
While he was in the hospital, he sent an aide — a guy named Max Miller — to the store to buy a Superman shirt for him. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find Underoos in a size Triple XL, which is a shame. Can you imagine him coming out of that hospital squeezed into the shirt like Kal-El Pollo Loco or something?
In Haberman’s much-talked about new book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (which, finally, comes out today), The New York Times reporter writes that that plan was for the then-president to be “wheeled out of Walter Reed in a chair and, once outdoors, he would dramatically stand up, then open his button-down dress shirt to reveal [a] Superman logo beneath it.”
“Listen, the only thing Trump does faster than a speeding bullet is have sex,” Kimmel noted. “We know that from Stormy Daniels.”
You can watch the full clip above, beginning around the 1:30 mark.