On Tuesday, the U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said the coronavirus pandemic is the greatest challenge that the world has faced since the Second World War. More than a hundred and fifty countries, many of them ill-equipped to battle the virus, are already gravely affected. Guterres predicted, as a result, “enhanced instability, enhanced unrest, and enhanced conflict.” In the United States, President Trump and his advisers now concede that more than two hundred thousand Americans could die, and businesses are bracing for a recession that will make the 2008 crisis “look like a cold,” as one prominent economist told me this week.

On Thursday, at 8:30 A.M., came the staggering news that a record 6.6 million Americans had filed for unemployment last week, meaning that ten million Americans have lost their jobs in just the first fourteen days of this coronavirus recession. Yet, less than an hour after this awful revelation, in the midst of a week that must surely count as one of the grimmest of his lifetime, Donald Trump was whining on Twitter about “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” and the “complainers” at the center of the epidemic in New York, who “should have been stocked up and ready long before this crisis hit.” By Thursday evening, he was grousing about “witch hunt after witch hunt after witch hunt” launched by Democrats against him.

The day before, when more than a thousand Americans died of the disease, the President staged a bizarre photo opportunity with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and other national-security leaders, to announce an oddly timed opening of a major new front in America’s war on Mexican drug cartels. During the event, Trump extemporized about what he often calls his “big, beautiful” wall on the southern border and its “tremendous impact,” and announced that he would deploy various Navy and Coast Guard ships for the new drug-fighting mission. (He also bragged about his “No. 1” status on Facebook, accused the former Secretary of State John Kerry of violating the law by advising Iran, and lamented, yet again, that no one could have possibly foreseen the global pandemic that nearly every global-health leader had been warning about for years.)

After this performance, I received a note from a former senior State Department official in the Trump Administration: “Seriously, WTF?? A new war on drugs? These people have so lost the plot it’s beyond parody.” Foreign Policy later reported that the whole thing had been just what it seemed to be: a political optics play by the President. “DoD was against it,” a former Trump Administration official told the magazine. “Didn’t matter to POTUS.”

When you are done being angry about all the crazy, nasty, inconsistent, and untrue things that Donald Trump says each day about the coronavirus and other matters, remember that the flood of words is cover for an Administration that in some ways barely exists relative to its predecessors, especially when it comes to crucial areas of domestic, economic, and international security—or even straightforward crisis management. Turnover at the upper levels of Trump’s White House stands at eighty-three per cent, according to a Brookings Institution tracker. In his Cabinet, Trump has had far more turnover than Presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and both George Bushes. The capacity of the federal government to respond to this catastrophe—even if Trump had been so inclined—has never been weaker. The virus was not of Trump’s making, but his government’s incoherent, disorganized response to it was utterly predictable.

On March 6th, Trump fired his acting White House chief of staff. Amid the extraordinary headlines of the world’s largest economy shutting down and the mass closure of U.S. schools and businesses, little attention was paid to the ouster of Mick Mulvaney and Trump’s appointment of a combative North Carolina congressman, the Republican Mark Meadows, as his successor. Even more remarkably, it was only this week, nearly a month later, that Meadows officially resigned from Congress and started in the White House, which he was required to do in order to avoid the constitutional prohibition on serving simultaneously in the executive and legislative branches. Trump, facing the gravest test a President can face, was literally without anyone to run his perpetually dysfunctional and faction-ridden White House.

Meadows is just the sort of political opportunist and cable-TV talking head to have been pulled into the President’s gravitational orbit—a former small-time real-estate developer in North Carolina’s Highlands with none of the executive experience or leadership credentials needed in this sort of crisis. In 2016, Meadows disdained Trump so much that he considered not taking part in the Republican Convention, in Cleveland, that year, “because he feared living with the legacy of nominating the erratic Trump,” the journalist Tim Alberta reported in his book “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.” Yet Meadows soon turned the House faction that he led, the Freedom Caucus, into Trump’s most vocal and reliable public defenders. On Tuesday, Meadows’s official first day in the White House, he became Trump’s fourth chief of staff in less than four years.

Trump forced out Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security—a massive agency, created after the 9/11 attacks, to respond to major domestic crises, such as the current pandemic—a full year ago. Not only has he yet to nominate a replacement, there is no longer even any talk that he will do so. In addition to its lack of a new Secretary, the department currently has no permanent Deputy Secretary, chief of staff, executive secretary, or undersecretary for management. At the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which falls under D.H.S.’s purview, there is no permanent deputy administrator, which is also the case at the Transportation Security Administration. The Times reported the other day that, out of seventy-five top positions in the department, twenty are either vacant or filled by acting officials.

This is the case across the government. Amid the pandemic upending the world, Trump has no Senate-confirmed director of National Intelligence, having pushed aside both the director and the subsequent acting director for perceived disloyalty. After the captain of an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, sent a memo pleading for relief for the hundreds of sailors facing a spreading COVID-19 outbreak on his ship, he was relieved of his command by the acting secretary of the Navy. The previous Navy secretary had been pushed out by Trump in November, after he objected when the President intervened in a war-crimes case involving a Navy SEAL and two other service members. Elsewhere at the Pentagon, the undersecretary in charge of policy planning for the military was recently fired, with no replacement in sight—a key vacancy at a moment when the global health crisis seems to suggest an urgent rethinking of America’s entire national-security strategy.

As far as the White House staff, much has already been made of Trump’s downgrading of the pandemic-response team at the National Security Council. But even where positions are filled, as in many of the top government jobs related to health, the problem is not so much endemic vacancy but “feebleness, cluelessness, disempowerment,” as Stephen Morrison, the head of global health programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, put it to me.