From the beginning, Trump minimized the scale of the crisis, portraying it as a purely foreign threat that could be addressed by closing borders. At a Feb. 26 news conference, he claimed there were 15 cases in America, omitting those diagnosed overseas. “The 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he said. As of this writing, there have been more than 210 cases confirmed across the country and 12 deaths.

Trump dismissed Democratic complaints about his handling of the crisis as “their new hoax.” Last week Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference that the media is paying so much attention to the coronavirus “because they think this is what’s going to be what brings down the president.” Speaking to Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, Trump seemed to imply that it was OK for people with the coronavirus to go to work: “So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work but they get better.” (He later wrote an angry tweet saying he’d never said sick people should go to work, but he certainly didn’t instruct them to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice and stay home.)

Within the administration, there’s strong pressure not to contradict Trump’s line. In February, when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned that community spread of the coronavirus in America was inevitable, the president was reportedly furious, and the director of the C.D.C. said she misspoke. Pro-Trump media figures like Rush Limbaugh suggested that she was part of an anti-Trump conspiracy because her brother is former Justice Department official Rod Rosenstein, often derided on the right as part of the Deep State.

The Times reported that Defense Secretary Mark Esper has warned the military not to make decisions related to the coronavirus that might “run afoul of President Trump’s messaging,” even as leaders have to make quick judgments about protecting troops stationed in countries with outbreaks. A Pentagon spokesperson took issue with the Times story, calling it a “dishonest misrepresentation.” Still, it seems as if in the midst of this burgeoning crisis, we’re seeing a coordinated, whole-of-government campaign to protect the president from being contradicted.