On Tuesday, the number of American coronavirus casualties reached a grim milestone. Over 4,000 deaths had been recorded, officially surpassing the number of Americans killed on September 11. The shock of those nearly 3,000 dead led to nearly 20 years of war, which killed hundreds of thousands abroad and reordered politics and the habits of daily life here at home. As of today, April 3, the pandemic has taken over 6,000 American lives, more than double that number.

The most influential projection of American coronavirus casualties remains last month’s epidemiological report from Imperial College London, which estimated that 2.2 million Americans would die if nothing at all was done to slow the spread of the virus and that over a million would die if, as the president proposed as recently as last week, American life proceeded mostly as normal with limited mitigation efforts aimed at protecting the most vulnerable. In recent days, those figures have been cited by the White House less to illustrate how grave the situation is than to anchor rhetoric about how well the administration has handled the response. “Think of the number: 2.2—potentially 2.2 million people if we did nothing,” Trump said at Sunday’s press briefing. “If we didn’t do the distancing, if we didn’t do all of the things that we’re doing.”

Trump went on to mention a lower potential death toll repeated by Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci: Given the measures already taken, the White House believes America could see 100,000 to 200,000 deaths before the virus runs its course. “If we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000,” the president said, “maybe even less, but to 100,000; so we have between 100 and 200,000—we all, together, have done a very good job.” A similar projection of 100,000 to 240,000 dead appeared on a chart that outlined the administration’s “goals of community mitigation” at Tuesday’s press conference. “We don’t accept that number, that that’s what it’s going to be,” Fauci stressed. “We are going to be doing everything we can to get it even significantly below that.” But the president characterized the estimate differently. “When you see 100,000 people,” he said, “that’s a minimum number.”

Trump’s public attitude now is miles from his attitude in late February, when he tweeted that the coronavirus was “very much under control in the USA” and claimed at a press briefing that the then 15 active cases in the country would soon decline “down to close to zero.” Since then, the number of cases has exploded to over a quarter of a million. Casualties will continue to mount, partially as a consequence of the administration’s mismanagement of the crisis—from the catastrophic testing failures to the White House’s inability and outright refusals to provide states with equipment. On Thursday, Jared Kushner chided those expecting a distribution of resources from strategic federal stockpiles. “The notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use.”

His nonchalance about the virus in its early days mattered.

Beyond the White House’s maladministration, the president’s mixed messaging has affected behavior on the ground. It should never be forgotten that Donald Trump is one of the most respected people in America. Somewhere between one-third and almost half the country hangs on his every word, as amplified by one of the country’s two major political parties and a vast media infrastructure committed to defending and lauding everything he says and does. His nonchalance about the virus in its early days mattered. This was confirmed again in a survey conducted by political scientists Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas Pepinsky that was released this week, which found that partisanship predicted individual responses to the virus more than any other factor, with Republicans reportedly “less likely than Democrats to report responding with CDC-recommended behavior” and consistently “less concerned about the pandemic.”