That’s how a normal politician would see the matter, at least. But Trump is different—and his flirtation with the idea of pardoning Flynn, along with some other things he has done over the past week, may actually be a harbinger of how he means to play the coronavirus crisis.

Two weeks ago, we noted that Trump’s typical playbook of lies and insults is ill-suited to combat a virus. The president’s latest enemy can’t be mowed over like a Republican senator or turned into a punching bag like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff or Special Counsel Robert Mueller. After three years of wriggling unharmed out of confrontations with other politicians or government officials, we argued, Trump now finds himself helpless.

The past two weeks have borne out this hypothesis. Trump has stubbornly refused to give up his old tricks, but as applied to the virus, they are not doing him much good. At first he denied the reality of the COVID-19 crisis, calling it a “hoax.” Then he denied that he had called it a hoax. He congratulated himself, insisting that the administration’s February decision to limit certain travel from China was a “lifesaving move,” and ignored other aspects of the federal government’s bumbling response to the virus. He declared, “The U.S. has done a very good job on testing. When people need a test they can get a test”—at the same time that people showing symptoms of COVID-19 across the country were unable to get tested. When unavoidably confronted with the test-kit debacle, he blamed the Obama administration.

Elizabeth Goitein: Trump’s Reasonable—and yet still worrisome—emergency declaration

To some extent, Trump has had success: Polling suggests that there is now a partisan split in how Americans view the virus, with more Democrats than Republicans worried about the pandemic. The trouble, though, is that a virus doesn’t care whether you take it seriously or not. Whatever the president’s supporters think now, they may change their views when, in two or three weeks, people they know begin suffering and dying because of COVID-19, to say nothing of the economic impact they will surely soon feel.

For that reason, the benefits of the president’s current strategy are likely to be extremely short-lived. The economy, which Trump has crowed about for the first three years of his presidency, is turning on him. And a virus’s exponential growth has a way of making itself known. Trump cannot lie his way out of the fact of death.

So what is Trump to do? In part, he seems to be shifting his tone in discussing the virus. He gave an unusually sober press conference about the crisis on Monday, sticking more or less to the facts about the scale of the present danger and giving up, at least temporarily, on his insistence that the virus had been contained—though he did announce that he would give the administration’s response a 10 out of 10, and hours later branded the pathogen the “Chinese Virus.”