Donald Trump’s entire career has been based on perception over fact. That’s what has allowed him to have failure after failure, bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and still find some poor suckers willing to bankroll his next Trump steaks, Trump magazine, Trump airlines, Trump casinos, Trump university. And—thanks to a network that decided it would be a great idea to package up this all-sizzle, no-steak career to sell Trump as America’s greatest businessman—there’s also Trump America. We all have to live in it. Or … not.

Because it’s clear at this point that Trump will continue to deal with this crisis not by dealing with it, but by claiming that it’s being dealt with. Trump will continue to claim that tests are available, even when experts on his own coronavirus team are calling the availability of testing a failure. Compare and contrast:

“We have a tremendous testing set up where people coming in have to be tested"— Donald Trump.

“The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we're not set up for that. I think it should be, but we're not." — Dr. Anthony Fauci

This follows days in which Trump has repeatedly insisted that “anyone who wants to be tested can get tested,” even when people were contradicting him at the same table.

That Trump’s claims are disconnected from the reality around him are clear. His Wednesday night address to the nation sent the stock markets into an immediate crash when it became obvious that, despite more than three months having elapsed since the World Health Organization began warning of the emerging epidemic, Trump had absolutely no plan. Instead, he chose to use the most critical moment of his time in the White House to label the pandemic a “foreign virus” and create a pointless policy meant more to punish leaders who had snickered at him during the last NATO summit than to do anything about stopping the further spread of the virus.

Now that Trump is past pretending to care about testing and pretending to care about containment, he’s moved to pretending to care about treatment—mostly in the form of attacking Joe Biden and pretending that disassembling the nation’s pandemic response team was a good thing.

The truth is that America beefed up its preparation for pandemic disease following 9/11 because people worried, with some justification, that the next attack on the United States might come in the form of a virus. The preparations put in place at that time were a big part of why the H1N1 flu outbreak, which began just weeks after Barack Obama became president, was dealt with through a comprehensive series of procedures that were widely praised. Even so, following that epidemic, healthcare approaches were reviewed again, resulting in the creation a national security team especially focused on dealing with the threat caused by emerging diseases.

And then Donald Trump came in and destroyed all that work. It’s not just that he rolled back America’s ability to deal with this situation to its pre-9/11 status; Trump also placed the focus, right from the beginning, on where he always puts it: the appearance that he knew what he was doing, or that the situation was being handled. That has involved deliberately underplaying the threat, deliberately distorting the availability of tests, deliberately underreporting the number of people infected, deliberately mischaracterizing the nature of the threat, deliberately classifying public health information to prevent Americans from hearing the truth, and deliberately reducing the number of tests conducted in order not to find more active cases.

Thanks to Donald Trump, America isn’t just going forward with a reduced ability to deal with this crisis; it’s operating in an environment where facts are being censured and distorted for the purpose of making Trump’s response look better than it is. When this was being done with regard to taxes or regulations, it was already harmful to the nation. Now that harm will be measured in numbers of bodies.