As the coronavirus crisis escalated in recent days, Donald Trump repeatedly cast the pandemic as something nobody could have seen coming. “Who would have thought?” he said during a recent trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Who would have thought we would even be having the subject?” But according to Politico’s Dan Diamond, Trump’s own White House recognized the gravity of the public health emergency, but the president personally undermined its response, seemingly more concerned about how it all would impact his reelection bid.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar raised alarms with Trump that the novel coronavirus “could be a major problem,” according to Diamond. And yet the president declined to act with urgency, refusing to push for testing that could lead to a larger number of confirmed cases in the United States that would undercut his efforts to play down the threat. “He did not push to do aggressive testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak,” Diamond told NPR’s Fresh Air Thursday. “And the president had made clear—the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.”

Trump has publicly suggested as much. During that same trip to the CDC last week, he told reporters that he wanted to have infected Diamond Princess passengers “stay on” the cruise ship, so as to keep them from being counted among the confirmed coronavirus cases on U.S. soil. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault,” Trump said. That Trump has and continues to filter the crisis through his craven and crude political calculus is unsurprising. But as Diamond reported last week, the president’s self-interest has undercut efforts by the federal government to combat the virus—“resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear.” Perhaps the clearest symptom of his mishandling? The inadequate testing that could have helped the U.S. face the pandemic head on, something officials told Politico stemmed from the president’s disregard and aides’ reluctance to give him bad news. “It always ladders to the top,” one person helping to advise the administration’s response told the outlet. “Trump’s created an atmosphere where the judgment of his staff is that he shouldn’t need to know these things.”

The president putting his own political interests over the well-being of the American people would constitute a stunning dereliction of duty. Crises have a way of throwing the truth into stark relief. Of course, the truth about Trump—that he is bewilderingly ignorant and incorrigibly narcissistic—has been obvious throughout his presidency and needed no pandemic to be revealed. And yet, his response to the rapidly escalating coronavirus threat seems to lay bare his unfitness for office in a way perhaps no other Trumpian fiasco has before it. At every turn, he has sought to minimize the crisis—but his “nothing to see here!” act has not changed the reality of the situation. And when aides finally convinced him to deliver an address to the nation, after the World Health Organization officially labeled coronavirus a pandemic, his careless assurances to the nation backfired, thanks to a remarkably messy speech in which he misstated key aspects of his own administration’s policy. “I think we’ll look back on this as a defining moment of the Trump presidency because it speaks to larger concerns that people already had about Trump—that he can’t tell the truth, that he doesn’t value expertise, that he doesn’t take the presidency seriously enough,” Ben Rhodes, a former senior aide to Barack Obama, told the Washington Post.