One month and three days ago, the president trumpeted that there were 15 cases of the novel coronavirus in the United States and the number would soon go to zero. Yesterday, he stood in the White House Rose Garden and suggested he will have done "a very good job" if there are between 100,000 and 200,000 American deaths. The goalposts seem to have moved here. The bar seems to have been lowered. Some of this is simply acknowledging reality, never a given with the current leadership: there are already 141,000 cases in the U.S. and over 2,000 deaths. Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN this weekend that the people who actually know things in this administration went to the president and made it clear to him that his desperate plan to "re-open the country" by Easter was suicidal. He has now abandoned it. We're a long way away from the days when Trump tried to block people disembarking a cruise ship because it would bring the numbers up.

But the president was never going to just acknowledge he was wrong to downplay and underestimate the threat posed by COVID-19 for the better part of two months. He was never going to admit that it was a mistake to keep saying it would all go away miraculously while doing absolutely nothing to prepare the country for a pandemic.

South Korea had its first case one day before the U.S., and set about supercharging its testing capacity to become the gold-standard response worldwide. Trump's early ban on travel from China may have bought the U.S. some time, but he used none of it to stockpile test kits, masks, or ventilators, or to build out hospital capacity. He waited until Friday—three days ago—to invoke the Defense Production Act to get American manufacturing to produce masks and ventilators on the scale that will be required. The United States failed in its early response, at least in part because Trump wanted to keep the case number down in the belief it would keep the Dow Jones Industrial Average up, and now we will reap the whirlwind.

Yet you'd never know it from his performance in the Rose Garden on Sunday. The insufficient number of masks and ventilators has nothing to do with him, you see. "I don't take any responsibility at all." The buck stops that-a-way—specifically, with nurses who are apparently smuggling masks out "the back door" and...selling them on the black market?

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"How do you go from 10 to 20 to 30,000, to 300,000 -- even though this is different. Something is going on. And you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going?" -- Trump suggests that there is some sort of New York nurse conspiracy to steal masks pic.twitter.com/6vubm89vgQ — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2020

Just get the masks, psycho. Jesus Christ. Anything to avoid taking responsibility. Nurses in some New York hospitals are wearing trash bags as personal protective equipment (PPE) and many more are reusing masks—against best practices—because there aren't enough. Some have died after being exposed to the virus. The idea this is somehow the fault of people fighting this pandemic on the front lines, rather than a federal government that has been criminally slow and ineffective in response, is disgusting. But it was a constant theme. The president suggested some hospitals are "hoarding" ventilators, and that's the real problem—not that he only just got to work getting more of them. He added that he's "hearing stories" about this. You're supposed to believe that.

He also went on an extended rant about "generators," by which he presumably meant "ventilators." Again, we've accepted this as normal.

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"We sent thousands of generators to New York ... the people in New York never distribute it the generators." -- Trump repeatedly refers to ventilators as "generators" pic.twitter.com/UyBXksP3FC — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2020

Is any of this true? In the end, it's a sideshow. New York needs tens of thousands of ventilators, not the couple thousand the feds have supplied, and only the feds can get the job done. Trump tried to leave it to the states and the only result was states and hospitals battling for limited resources. Again: just get more ventilators. Nobody cares about the petty disputes with governors and whether they're sufficiently praising you as The Leader—which, by the way, appears to be informing which states get the aid they're asking for.

That tied into the main event: Trump's bizarro confrontation with PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor, who had the nerve to ask him about something he said last week. Nobody makes me hear my own bullshit, Trump suggested, channeling White Goodman.

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"That's why you used to work for the Times and now you work for somebody else" -- Trump unloads on Yacmiche Alcindor for asking him a question about his attacks on blue state governors pic.twitter.com/iVe5fWEXjG — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2020

The basic democratic concept of accountability—that elected leaders will be questioned about what they say and do—is completely anathema to the president, who seems to think that the entire nation should operate like The Trump Organization. The idea we have merely appointed him to a temporary management job has not really sunk in. He seems to think he owns the ventilators, and governors should suck up to him appropriately if they want some. This pathological narcissism runs so deep that Trump has publicly denied resources to Michigan, one of three states that basically delivered him the presidency and which will be crucial in 2020, because its governor has not praised him sufficiently. His impulsive neediness is so consuming that it legitimately undermines his capacity for strategic thought. He has given Florida everything they asked for, however, which also came up. Trump dodged the question.



And then, inevitably, came the Blame Obama portion of proceedings.

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In an effort to shift blame to Obama, Trump claims the federal shortage of medical gear he inherited is like his made up story about how the military was out of ammunition before he took office pic.twitter.com/lGMK8kbPaE — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2020

So stockpiling these supplies was the responsibility of the federal government until Trump took control of it...three years ago. But somehow, it was not Trump's responsibility for the last three years. (And then there's the pandemic response team—and playbook—Obama put in place in the White House after the Ebola crisis, and which Trump essentially discarded.) To sum up, any deficiencies in the United States response are the fault of hoarding hospitals, nurses who are spiriting masks out the back door, blue-state governors who are being very nasty to Mr. Trump, and Obama. Nothing is down to the President of the United States, who is both doing everything he can in the best way possible and also has no responsibility to do anything at all. But his press conferences, he's happy to tell you, are getting great ratings. Like The Bachelor, but even more dignified.

This avalanche of bullshit continued into Monday morning, when the president devoted some of his ample free time—amid, again, a global pandemic that he now says will kill 100,000 Americans—to a venting session on The Fox News Channel. The president called in to talk to some of his best friends in the world, the Fox & Friends, about how the ratings are good and this is Obama's fault and Nancy Pelosi lives in a slum. We have accepted this. Oh, that's just the president again. There is no expectation he will behave like an adult, much less the leader of a nation of 325 million people that once believed it was Exceptional.



Oh, and he also had some thoughts on Germany, Russia, and 20th-century history.

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Trump on Russia: "They also fought World War 2. They lost 50 million people. They were on partner, in World War 2. Germany was the enemy. And Germany's like this wonderful thing...now we don't talk to Russia, we talk to Germany. I mean, look, it's fine. I want to talk to Germany" pic.twitter.com/EKGrigsvB3 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 30, 2020

Is the president going to use this crisis as an opportunity to roll back U.S. sanctions against Vladimir Putin's oligarch cronies, one of the core goals Russia had when attacking our democracy in 2016 to get Trump elected? Who knows. The administration is already pursuing a grab-bag of corrupt initiatives using the crisis as a pretext, including an escalated destruction of the Environmental Protection Agency. Chaos is a ladder, and all that. Meanwhile, the president seems to think nothing has changed in America's relations with Germany or Russia since 1945.

This is who we've seen fit to put in charge of our country. A man whose deranged thirst for praise and attention runs so deep that he's processing this crisis in large part in terms of TV ratings and what various state governors are saying about him. This thirst is so deeply ingrained that he may torpedo his standing with voters in Michigan, a state he knows he needs to get re-elected. He knows this, but he cannot bring himself to place it before the need for praise and admiration and avoiding humiliation. He is incapable of strategic thinking, a slave to impulse. The actual results are secondary to the perception of them, which he still believes he can shape in his favor as large numbers of Americans die. Fake News. Democrats. Obama. Hoarding hospitals. He will never take responsibility for anything. We have higher standards for cheating baseball teams.

It took three years for the president to encounter a genuine external crisis that impacted the entire country—Hurricane Maria's destruction, and the consequences of his miserable response, were mostly relegated to an American territory we all choose to ignore—and he has so far failed. However, if we hadn't chosen him, we would have made president someone who used private email for official business, which basically the entire national political media pretended to believe was a serious issue for over a year. Ah, about that.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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