Donald Trump has identified the enemy. Three months after the coronavirus arrived in the United States, and more than 23,000 deaths later, our president has put his finger on what ails us.

It is not, as he may have said many times, invisible. It is not even a very brilliant virus that has outsmarted the world’s antibiotics. It is, in fact, the media.

I warned of Trump’s attack on science. But I never predicted the horror that lay ahead | Ariel Dorfman Read more

Yes, you know who you are, you viral agents of destruction. Because of you, our valiant commander-in-chief was forced to spend the bulk of his so-called media briefing on Easter Monday taking the fight against the pandemic to where it really needs to be waged: with reporters.

Hospitals may be at breaking point, and the economy may be in a depression. But our brave American hero devoted precious White House resources to the most urgent task of all: rebutting a New York Times investigation into how he frittered away all those months since China lost control of the virus in Hubei.

Donning his own N95 mask of truth, our nation’s very stable genius commanded the lights be dimmed inside the White House briefing room and for the video to roll.

Play Video 3:13 Trump plays campaign-style video attacking press at White House briefing – video

How he eviscerated the media by showing them downplaying the virus in January!

How he demonstrated his courage by banning travel from China at the end of January, even though 40,000 still managed to enter the country!

How he skipped over the entire month of February to jump to all the many big numbers and other things he said in March!

Abandon hope, all ye who enter the briefing room!

Except for Paula Reid of CBS who pointed out – frankly a little too often – that Trump didn’t use the time after his China “travel ban” to do, well, anything.

“You’re so disgraceful,” Trump shot back with the kind of rapier-like rejoinder that makes him a modern-day Cyrano.

When Reid pressed on with her pesky questions about what he was doing for the entire month of February, Trump promised to give her “the list”.

“Look, look, you know you’re a fake,” he said with a flourish. “The people are wise to you. That’s why you have a lower approval rating.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter the briefing room!’ Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

Allow us, Mr President, to save you the time of coming up with your list of all the many bold and – dare we say it – quite brilliant things you said and did in February, as the virus was spreading across America.

For the first half of the month, you said the warm weather would cause the virus to go away. For the second half, you said it was very much under control. By the end of the month, you said the numbers of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero”. Oh yes, and you predicted that “one day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear”.

And so, like a miracle, our historic leader – he won’t call himself historic, but many people tell him he is – has made the month of February vanish from our collective memory. Because, quite frankly, what has February ever done for America? It doesn’t even have 30 days.

Monday was a day for kicking some rebuttal. The briefing began with Dr Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director responsible for protecting millions of American souls, expressing regret for his choice of words in a TV interview on Sunday.

Fauci may be the only man standing between us and a catastrophically large death toll. But his main job right now is to protect one man’s ego – or else his words won’t penetrate that man’s exceptionally thick cranium.

What on earth did Fauci say to hurt our president’s feelings so much? Just the blindingly obvious: that an earlier shutdown would have saved lives. “I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different,” he explained to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”

That was so Sunday. By Monday, America’s greatest living immunologist said that was a poor choice of words, and he bristled when reporters suggested he wasn’t rolling back his words voluntarily. “Everything I do is voluntary,” he snapped. “Please. Don’t even imply that.”

While Fauci was visibly steamed, Trump was visibly swaggering.

His shoulders shimmied at the mere mention of his “travel ban”. His spirits soared at his staff-made video showing Democratic governors thanking him for his support.

The resurrection of Trump’s ego was an Easter miracle only matched by some guy in the Bible whose ratings were a lot worse

Never mind the recovery of Boris Johnson. The resurrection of Trump’s ego was an Easter miracle only matched by some guy in the Bible whose ratings were a lot worse.

“We could give you hundreds of clips like that. We have them,” he said, like a hostage-taker playing with our hopes. “I had some clips from Anthony that were really good.” Specifically, our courageous commander-in-chief had some clips of the good doctor saying he had saved “a lot of lives” with his so-called travel ban.

So what if he retweeted some random supporter who used the hashtag #FireFauci? “That’s somebody’s opinion,” Trump said, unconvincingly, while also saying, unconvincingly, that he wasn’t firing him. “Not everybody’s happy with Anthony. Not everybody’s happy with everybody.”

Not everybody is safe in their homes at night. Not everybody gets in their car without it blowing up.

And not everybody spends all their free time searching for something nice to retweet about himself. Even if it comes from random callers on C-Span.

It may possibly be the case – and we must be careful in our diagnosis without full testing capabilities – that this president is a microscopically small virus inhabiting the body of a very large nation.

What other kind of organism would claim to have “total authority” over his own country? Only a mutant life form relying on that non-existent line in the constitution that says, as he put it, “when someone is president of the United States, the authority is total”.

We could wait for the massed ranks of the Republican party, and all the many judges it has recently confirmed to lifetime appointments, to condemn such brazenly un-American sentiments. After all, these are the same people who claimed that Obamacare was unconstitutional.

Or we could just sit back and admire the brilliance of this virus who has outsmarted the world’s constitutional conservatives, its medical scientists and the deviant media.

Is it bold? Absolutely. Is it leadership? We’ll get back to you in November.