This call came one day after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for help from the Army Corps of Engineers. “You will be not able to flatten the curve to avoid the wave. You will be short thousands of ICU beds, thousands of ventilators. The only way to prevent that today given this time constraint is to deploy The Army Corps of Engineers and use that to capacity retrofit existing facilities to free up hospital beds. The decision is easy when you have no options. Here, the nation has no option,” Cuomo said Sunday. “Then,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “we can designate existing hospital beds for the acutely ill.”

But Trump’s answer on Monday was clear: states and their governors are on their own. The Trump administration is not taking responsibility in the sense of stepping up to help meet the needs of the moment any more than Donald Trump is taking responsibility in the sense of admitting that he owns any part of this.