Among all the possible consequences that were discussed after Donald Trump was elected, in 2016, a revival of federalism didn’t feature prominently. Three and a half years later, here we are. On Monday, the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington announced a “Western States Pact” to work toward reopening their economies on an agreed set of principles after the coronavirus shutdowns, and the governors of seven Northeastern states said they were creating a joint working group for the same purpose.

The governors didn’t state explicitly that they were sidelining the federal government and Trump: they didn’t need to. “Health outcomes and science—not politics—will guide these decisions,” Gavin Newsom, Kate Brown, and Jay Inslee, the respective governors of California, Oregon, and Washington, said in a joint statement. “We need to see a decline in the rate of spread of the virus before large-scale reopening, and we will be working in coordination to identify the best metrics to guide this.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, said the seven Eastern states—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—would each appoint a public-health official and an economic-development expert to the new working group, which would be tasked with producing a coördinated strategy. “The state boundaries mean very little to this virus,” Cuomo said. “Somebody could get on Amtrak or get in a car and go up the I-95 corridor. . . . doesn’t matter where they are from.”

The announcements from both ends of the country came just hours after Trump had insisted, on Twitter, that a judgment on whether to reopen the economy “is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons.” His tweet went on, “A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!” At a White House press briefing later in the day, Trump refused to say whether he was looking to May 1st as his target date, but he again sought to assert his authority, saying, “I’m going to put it very simply. The President of the United States has the authority to do what the President has the authority to do. Which is very powerful.”

That was certainly very simple, but constitutional-law experts were quick to question Trump’s claims. “The President has no formal legal authority to categorically override local or state shelter-in-place orders or to reopen schools and small businesses,” Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, tweeted. “No statute delegates to him such power; no constitutional provision invests him with such authority.” Other experts on the Constitution agreed.

When asked about the basis of his claims, Trump said that the White House could give reporters a legal brief if they wanted one. This goes beyond a scholarly dispute, though. As has often happened in recent weeks, we are witnessing a bifurcation of reality into two separate realms. There is actual reality, in which the governors of the worst-hit states and many federal officials, including some in the White House, are doing all they can to contain the coronavirus, fortify the health-care system, and try to give households and businesses financial life support, and they look forward to the day when a combination of falling rates of infection, ubiquitous testing, and robust medical capacity will provide an opportunity to gradually reopen parts of the economy.

Then there is Trump’s alternative reality, wherein the mood can swing violently from day to day, but the constant and overriding concern is to preserve the myth that all is going smoothly. Journalists have the freedom, and the duty, to point out the blatant contradictions between these two disparate realms. Many of the people who are actually dealing with the virus—the governors and the members of Trump’s task force—have no such luxury. To get vital things done, such as moving medical supplies to the right places at the right times, they need Trump’s coöperation, or, at least, his passive acquiescence. So they perform an intricate dance in which they seek to avoid alienating him while also, on occasion, trying to work around him.

Thus, Cuomo and Newsom, in their daily briefings, often thank Trump for vital assistance that the federal government has provided, such as military hospital ships and various bits of medical equipment, while also chiding him for failing to provide over-all leadership. “When you go to war, you don’t say every state has to buy its own tanks, every state has to buy its own guns,” Cuomo commented acidly to CNN, on Monday, as he asserted New York’s right to follow its own course, even as he also called on Trump to put forward a set of principles for reopening the economy, which he and other governors could discuss. “The President is the President,” Cuomo said. “He has to put forth a model.”

Another person who has to deal with Trump’s selective grasp of reality is Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At a White House briefing on Monday evening, Fauci sought to dispel the impression that he and Trump had been at loggerheads over when to recommend an economic shutdown and the imposition of social-distancing guidelines. After Fauci told CNN on Sunday that earlier action would have saved many lives, Trump retweeted a post that featured the hashtag “#FireFauci.” At Monday’s press conference, Fauci again stated that earlier action would have been beneficial. But he also said that, the first time he and Deborah Birx, who is the coördinator of the White House task force, made a formal recommendation to Trump to switch to a mitigation strategy that would involve recommending shutdowns, “the President listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation.”

On the face of it, that statement sounded exculpatory, and giving this impression was clearly Fauci’s intention. But Fauci didn’t linger on what happened in the vital few weeks starting in mid-February, which, according to big reconstructions that the Washington Post and the New York Times recently published, was when the Administration’s top health experts became convinced that a lockdown was urgently needed. Far from embracing this idea, Trump blew up when the stock market fell sharply, after Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said publicly that tough measures, including school closures and mandatory social distancing, would be necessary.

The full story of what happened inside the Administration has yet to be told. It seems clear, though, that it took several weeks for Fauci and Birx to get Trump to abandon his alternative reality. As late as March 15th, the day before the White House formally came out in support of lockdowns, Fauci told ABC News’s “This Week” that he was still “working” on Trump to abide by social-distancing guidelines in his personal dealings. A week later, on March 22nd, Trump tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” and seemed to imply that the restrictions would soon be lifted.

The time line demonstrates how the President of the United States has been a barrier to effective and systematic action rather than a facilitator or progenitor of such action. Thomas Jefferson, were he to rise from the grave, might be encouraged by what the states have accomplished with only intermittent help from Washington, although he surely wouldn’t have acceded to Trump’s dismissal of any criticism as “fake news.” Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, who believed in a strong and effective executive, would be dismayed, and for good reason. As a consequence of Trump’s presence in the Oval Office, many of the most populous parts of the United States are engaged in the biggest and most perilous workaround that the Union has ever seen. Monday’s announcements by the two sets of governors merely made this official.

A Guide to the Coronavirus