“Look, you’re going to lose a number of people to the flu,” he said during the town hall. “But you’re going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression.”

That unease is hardly confined to the president and to glib conservative supporters of his like Dan Patrick, the 69-year-old lieutenant governor of Texas, who said in an interview on Fox News on Monday night: “I’m not living in fear of Covid-19. What I’m living in fear of is what’s happening to this country. And you know, Tucker, no one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

The issue of trade-offs and of how best to balance epidemiological and economic concerns has informed many articles in the Opinion pages of The Times, receiving more measured consideration from my colleague Tom Friedman, from two academic titans and from a public-health expert, David Katz, who recently wrote, “I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself.”

That perspective transcends political party. A prominent Democrat, for instance, said to me, “Will we lose more Americans to suicide than to the coronavirus?” That was days before Trump, during the town hall, said that if the country is locked down for long, “you’re going to have suicides by the thousands.”

This is excruciatingly tough stuff, and yet Trump is pre-empting the thorough and thoughtful deliberation that it demands — and painting himself into a corner — with pledges that the economy will roar back and that America will “be open for business very soon, a lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting — a lot sooner,” as he said on Monday. If you’re an enemy of “soon,” you’re on thin ice with him. I can hear it cracking under Anthony Fauci even as I type.

The president’s obsession with the economy is an extension of his obsession with wealth. He has only two lenses through which he sees the world, two yardsticks by which he measures everyone and everything: money and celebrity. He can’t pretend otherwise because he doesn’t bother to try.