After Friday, as the scale of potential American deaths became clear, the Dow began to spurn Trump’s supplications. Trump, like an ardent suitor, gave chase. His once-obscure Coronavirus Task Force began holding news conferences, with Trump himself appearing daily before the press. He did what he could to whip up good news, even as the numbers that mattered — deaths and infections — rose on an exponential track. It was as though Trump considered the pandemic to be a creature of mass psychology, like a run on a bank, when it was more like a burning theater. Even if you persuade the audience to stay calm and remain seated — even if you convince them that the theater’s management has taken the vigorous and decisive step of calling 911 — the theater will still be on fire.

Of course, it is certainly possible that the Dow will soon give in to Trump’s supplications. That seems marginally more likely now that Trump has opened a second front in his rhetorical fight. The allegedly priceless sanctity of human life, he seemed to suggest, had to be aggregated, quantified and balanced against the Dow. “The whole concept of death is terrible,” is how he put it, “but there’s a tremendous difference between something under 1 percent and 4 or 5 or even 3 percent.” According to this logic, the small number of people who burn to death in their seats are the tragic price paid by the collective so that the show can go on.

Some of the players, meanwhile, had already sneaked out of the wings. Starting in January, the senators Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein and Kelly Loeffler each sold stock valued in the mid-six figures or more. (Feinstein indicated that the decision to sell was her husband’s. Loeffler attributed it to financial advisers. Burr said his sales were based “solely on public news reports,” not the official briefings that he, Loeffler and other senators received about the virus’s rapid spread.) But getting ahead of the market’s downturn proved easier for Capitol Hill than outrunning the illness causing it. By late March, at least three members of Congress had tested positive for the corona­virus; another five, at least, were quarantining themselves after learning they’d been in contact with someone who was ill. On March 20, a week after Dobbs touted the Dow’s big rise, Fox Business announced that one of its employees had tested positive. By that time, Dobbs, who recently called out “the national left-wing media, playing up fears of the coronavirus,” was one week into his own self-quarantine. “Lou feels well,” another Fox host assured the audience. “He has no symptoms.”