But, paradoxically, it’s for this very reason that the idea that Trump will meet with officials to get briefed on the situation is cause for serious worry.

Given what we’ve seen from Trump, this presents an occasion for him to prod officials to validate his own preferred version of what’s happening, which is far rosier than that of the officials themselves.

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Some new reporting in The Post underscores this possibility. Trump has been downplaying the potential impact of coronavirus on the United States, but he’s privately raging over the situation. Note why he’s raging:

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Privately, Trump has become furious about the stock market’s slide, according to two people familiar with the president’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal details. While he has spent the past two days traveling in India, Trump has watched the stock market’s fall closely and believes extreme warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have spooked investors, the aides said.

This hints at a combustible situation. We already know Trump views the markets as a kind of backup gauge of his chances of reelection.

But now, with markets tumbling, Trump has persuaded himself that warnings from his own administration’s health officials about the public threat it poses to Americans are to blame for those market travails.

The bad news delivered by CDC officials — in particular, by director Robert Redfield — is that coronavirus will likely gain a “foothold” in the United States “beyond this year.” It may become “like seasonal flu,” with the crucial difference that “we don’t understand this virus.”

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But as Dr. Sanjay Gupta told CNN, our response may be falling short. Trump’s request for $2.5 billion is substantially smaller than requests against previous outbreaks. The response lacks a coordinating overseer, Gupta argued, and we may not be mentally prepared for the contingency planning needed.

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In this context, Trump’s focus on the reaction of markets — and his belief that public health warnings are driving it — becomes seriously problematic.

Indeed, barely minutes after trying to project hands-on control, Trump veered into a wildly paranoid Twitter rant, railing that the “Fake News” media is deliberately trying to panic markets by making coronavirus “look as bad as possible."

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The trouble here is not merely that we can’t have confidence in someone this unhinged to handle a public health threat. This also goes to the core of Trump’s ongoing effort to eradicate neutrality itself.

Trump’s war on neutrality

The core absurdity of Trump raging at the media for hyping coronavirus is that his own officials are describing it in terms Trump won’t acknowledge. He doesn’t want them to publicly do this, because it influences his leading gauge of his political health.

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What we know is that Trump has serially manipulated the machinery of government to reverse-validate things he wants to make true for political or even corrupt purposes.

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Trump set up a commission to validate his lies about voter fraud. Officials have repeatedly produced cooked statistics to prop up his lies about immigration. He apparently doctored a weather chart and got officials to support the move rather than admit previous error.

Trump raged at his intelligence officials for briefing Congress about ongoing Russian electoral sabotage, which could hamstring congressional oversight of the response to a threat to our country.

These are matters of great importance to the American people. But Trump and/or his underlings used the government to deceive the public about them or withhold information from lawmakers to prevent scrutiny of his handling of them.

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In a sense, as ethics expert Walter Shaub points out, Trump’s attacks on the whistleblower who revealed his Ukraine scheme and his purging of officials who stood in the way of his corrupt designs also belong in this category.

That’s because such acts violate a cardinal ethic of good governance: While executive branch officials serve at the president’s pleasure, they are supposed to serve the U.S. public in good faith, not serve Trump’s personal and/or corrupt ends. They are not supposed to be punished for doing the former and not the latter.

Everyone is corrupt. It only matters who wins.

The connecting thread here is that in Trump’s worldview, the idea that government officials — and mediating institutions like the news media — can neutrally serve the public in good faith is treated as an impossibility. Everything is subject to corruption and manipulation in one direction or another, whether for Trump or against Trump.

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If the media reports facts about coronavirus that Trump fears will damage him politically, or if officials follow procedures ensuring accountability in government — as the whistleblower and officials who testified to Congress about the Ukraine scheme did — these things can only constitute corruption in their own right, that is, corrupt plots against Trump.

All this justifies any and all efforts to corrupt government that Trump undertakes on his own behalf. Everyone is corrupt. All that matters is who wins or loses.

It’s easy to imagine Trump similarly trying to get officials to publicly downplay what they tell him about the coronavirus threat. After all, he’s retaliating against those who are only hyping it to damage him.

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If that happens, it’s of course theoretically possible officials will marshal an effective response to the coronavirus in spite of it — behind Trump’s back. But if there were ever a time when we need public officials to deliver neutral, unpoliticized information to us, it’s in the face of a threat like this one.

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