The Washington Post tweeted early Friday morning after President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump were diagnosed with coronavirus: “Opinion: Imagine what it will be like to never have to think about Trump again.”

The ill-timed tweet was sent at 1:33 a.m. EDT, 39 minutes after President Trump tweeted news of the diagnosis.

Washington Post tweet (Screenshot / Twitter)

The Post‘s twitter feed made the offending tweet seem like a reaction to the news, though the two articles were unrelated:

Washington Post twitter feed (Screenshot / Twitter)

The tweet linked to a column by Eugene Robinson, which had been posted early Thursday afternoon and was unrelated to the news of Trump’s diagnosis.

Still, the timing of the Post tweet made the column rather macabre reading:

If you are like me and you watched Tuesday’s debate with a voice in your head screaming make it stop, take heart: We have the power to do just that. We can evict President Trump from the territory he has forcibly seized in our minds. We can — we must — vote him out of our thoughts.

We can remove this awful man from our collective headspace, which he has so thoroughly befouled. We can reclaim our serenity, our equilibrium, our sense 0f common humanity. We can return to a time when it was possible to go hours or even entire days without once thinking about what our president might be saying or doing. We can exhale.

At a recent rally in North Carolina, Trump was making one of his rambling attempts to mock Joe Biden when he told the crowd: “If I lose to him, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I will never speak to you again. You’ll never see me again.” Biden’s social media team quickly posted a clip of Trump’s remarks, then added a zinger: “I’m Joe Biden, and I approve this message.”

…

Imagine what we could do with the brainpower that is now sucked into Trump’s massive black hole of an ego. How much easier would it be to convince our neighbors to follow the advice of scientists on how best to halt the covid-19 pandemic without having to spend time combating Trump’s bleach-soaked misinformation campaign? What might we be able to do to stimulate a devastated economy without having to worry about the president’s need to brand every bit of aid as a personal gift? Where might the conversation about systemic racism be able to start without the president questioning whether racism even exists, or ever existed, in the faux-America of his limited imagination?

The Post‘s motto, adopted for the Trump presidency, is: “Democracy dies in darkness.”

Update: The Washington Post deleted the tweet at roughly 2:00 a.m. EDT.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.