Instead, with the current measures in place — including federal guidelines recommending extreme social distancing through the end of April and travel restrictions for various global hot spots — the death toll is expected to fall between 100,000 and 240,000, according to the government model. Yet Trump has mentioned the actual expected death totals only about 10 times since Sunday, calling the figure “sobering” and “horrible” but a victory when compared to the 2.2 million figure.

“If we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000 … we all, together, have done a very good job,” he said.

It was a notable change in posture after Trump initially signaled optimism about the virus and said in late February that cases would soon “be down close to zero.”

And it reflects the latest messaging campaign as Trump, backed by his aides and surrogates, argues that the administration’s actions are responsible for saving lives.

Trump and the White House have repeatedly pointed to the president’s decision in late January to close most travel from China, where the coronavirus originated, as having lowered the number of predicted casualties from as high as 2.2 million to as low as 100,000. Other moves, such as the administration’s social-distancing guidelines and further travel restrictions on Europe and South Korea, have also pushed down the potential fatalities, they say.

“It was those numbers that were presented to the president, taking into account the measures we had done before, the fact that the president suspended all travel from China in January,” Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday on CNN.

The same day, Trump also painted himself as the savior of a testing system that has lagged in the first few months of the coronavirus outbreak, as states have struggled to process coronavirus tests in a timely fashion. Trump has argued — inaccurately — that Obama-era guidelines prevented the swift approval of commercial coronavirus tests, and said he came along and changed them. He also has falsely claimed that World Health Organization coronavirus test kits were bad tests and that the U.S. has developed better ones.

“We inherited bad tests. These are horrible tests. And it was broken, it was all broken and we fixed it,” Trump said.

The Trump administration on Friday also approved a new rapid coronavirus test and is currently determining where to deliver those tests. Senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday argued that the move was among several Trump had made that would “save lives and mitigate damage to the Americans.”