Now we may be facing a vicious cycle. As it becomes clearer with each passing day that Trump was uniquely ill-prepared to respond to coronavirus both in personality and because of the way he has hollowed out the federal government, he will face more and more criticism, not only from liberals but also from experts of all kinds.

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Meanwhile, his desire to get the economy moving will continue to clash with what his own public health experts are telling him. His most devoted and cultish supporters in the conservative media will then attack those experts — attacks that Trump will see, assimilate and repeat.

The result will be an escalating conflict spurred on by his right-wing hype men, convincing him that it’s all a conspiracy against him and encouraging him to discount whatever scientists are telling him. And the pandemic will only get worse. It’s happening already:

A cadre of right-wing news sites pulled from the fringes in recent years through repeated mention by President Trump is now taking aim at Anthony S. Fauci, the ­nation’s top infectious diseases ­expert, who has given interviews in which he has tempered praise for the president with doubts about his pronouncements. ... Beyond prime-time television, however, the disregard for expert guidance being pushed by some conservative and libertarian voices goes further — aimed not simply at proving Fauci wrong but at painting him as an agent of the “deep state” that Trump has vowed to dismantle. The smear campaign taking root online, and laying the groundwork for Trump to cast aside the experts on his own coronavirus task force, relies centrally on the idea that there is no expertise that rises above partisanship, and that everyone has an agenda.

This has been bubbling up for days from the right: In their telling, Fauci is just the most visible representative of the pointy-headed elitists who would like nothing more than to see Trump lose in November, so they’re insisting that we take aggressive social-distancing measures as a way of holding back the economy.

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This argument is perfectly pitched to play on both Trump’s belief that there is always a conspiracy against him and his deep insecurity about people who have expertise and training he lacks.

It’s why Trump so often talks about how he knows more than the experts, and why he once said: “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Trump’s base is all too willing to agree that experts can’t be trusted, because their politicians have been telling them so for decades. Whether it’s biologists talking about evolution or climate scientists talking about global warming, the message from Republicans has always been that these elitist liberals hate you and your way of life, and their “science” is nothing more than a tool to keep you down.

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That anti-elitism — though not directed at the economic elites, heavens no — is absolutely central to the Republican political project, since it’s not easy to assemble majorities when your highest priority is making rich people richer.

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But Trump’s relationship with expertise and credentials is more complicated than the simple anti-elite sentiment often promoted by other Republicans. He is simultaneously contemptuous of elites and desperate for their acceptance.

You can hear this when he tells a rally in West Virginia that “I have a lot more money than they do. I have a much better education than they have. I’m smarter than they are. I have many much more beautiful homes than they do. I have a better apartment at the top of Fifth Avenue. Why the hell are they the elite? Tell me.”

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The elite’s greatest sin, according to Trump, is not that they scorn the common folk but that they won’t accept him as one of their own, no matter how many gold-slathered apartments he owns.

This same contradiction is at work right now, with Trump simultaneously dismissive of those with experience and training in public health and desperate to be seen as equaling them in intellect. When he visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Trump noted of those gathered around him: “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

In the coming weeks, these forces pulling at Trump will likely only intensify. The experts will tell him that the worst thing would be to encourage people to resume normal life prematurely, allowing the virus to gain new footholds. His conservative media allies will tell him that he has to ignore the experts and get the economy going.

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And he’ll want to prove that he knows more than anyone. It’s hard to have confidence that he’ll make the right decisions.