Nothing screams “reassuring” during a spreading global pandemic quite as much as seeing one’s president unable even to read a short speech printed in his native language in large letters on a Teleprompter after having spent weeks deriding mounting evidence of the pandemic as “fake news.” That was America’s experience during President Trump’s Oval Office address last week, as it observed its leader struggle to read the blather-heavy remarks hastily cobbled together for him to deliver to an increasingly anxious nation. It was, tweeted MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in real time, “like he’s reading a foreign language phonetically.”

Trump’s stab at looking presidential was as devoid of credibility as any performance he has ever given, and that is saying something. No one watching it save the most hopelessly gullible could have believed that the president had the vaguest idea what he was doing. It was enough to trigger the only wave of nostalgia for Herbert Hoover on record, and it was no wonder that within minutes of the start of Trump’s talk, aimed at assuring Americans that everything was under control, stock markets tanked and American civil society began announcing that it was shutting down.

It took no Ph.D. in public relations to recognize that Trump’s address had been the Hindenburg disaster of spin control, and his team quickly attempted a do-over, arranging a Rose Garden press conference for him. There the president was joined by a gaggle of CEOs, none appearing to know what he was doing there, each tasked with affirming their general willingness to help their country in statements no more than 30 seconds in length.

But it was not much of an improvement over the Oval Office address. For weeks Trump had been dismissing the very idea that the coronavirus was worth worrying about, let alone preparing for. “We have it totally under control,” he told an interviewer on Jan. 22. “It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.” On Feb. 2 he trotted out the same snake oil. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” the president said. During February and into March he was accusing Democrats calling for action to combat the virus of promoting “fake news,” once again accusing those who saw reality differently than he of promoting a “hoax.”

Asked in the Rose Garden by PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor about his 2018 dismantling of the White House unit tasked with addressing global health crises and whether he was prepared to take any responsibility for his administration’s failure to prepare for the pandemic, the president displayed that stand-up guy quality for which he is famous.

“I think it’s a nasty question,” he snapped. “When you say me, I didn’t do it. We have a group of people in this administration.”

Pressed by NBC’s Kristen Welker whether he accepted any responsibility for our ill-preparedness, the Prince of Bone Spurs was true to character. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said, ever the role model.

Then there was the White House’s strange roll-out of a poster board with a graphic touting a website that Americans supposedly could access for coronavirus testing, according to the president, developed by Google and ready for use “very quickly.”

This was news to Google, which quickly corrected him. Turns out its subsidiary has merely agreed to try to develop a pilot website, which is not ready, and won’t be ready anytime soon.

It was Vice President Mike Pence, head of the president’s coronavirus task force, who inadvertently captured the alternate universe in which Trump World resides. “This day should be an inspiration to every American,” he proclaimed at the press conference with a perfectly straight face.

It was a reminder that something was seriously unhealthy in America even before the coronavirus hit, and will remain amiss even after it is defeated.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commision and a syndicated columnist.