Accuse them of what you're doing, so that when they say you're the one doing it, nobody believes them—or at least it's a wash. That's one of the governing principles of Donald Trump's life, and he has brought that to his Movement in a big way. He jumped at the chance to brand his 2016 opponent as Crooked Hillary, so that when mountains of evidence emerged that he was perhaps the shadiest major-party presidential nominee in modern history, it all fell a bit flat with the public. After all, his opponent was Crooked, too. This principle has popped up again with regard to the current administration's response to the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19.

As has become painfully obvious by now, the president's main priority is downplaying the issue in the immediate term out of concern that the Dow Jones Industrial Average will go down. (It still went down.) During a brain-melting appearance in a 10-gallon baseball cap at the Centers for Disease Control on Friday, he spread misinformation about the availability of testing, voiced his opposition to allowing American citizens off a cruise ship to get better medical treatment because it would bring "the numbers" up, and of course, went off on a rant about Fox News ratings. He kicked off Tuesday morning with another meditation on Fox's viewership relative to its cable-news competitors, and why not? It's not like there's anything else going on.

And besides, Fox is his friend. Fox says nice things about him. Just look at what Trish Regan had to say Monday night on Fox Business.

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You gotta watch this, I mean........you just gotta watch pic.twitter.com/x2ZsayVrmv — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) March 10, 2020

And it's here where The Principle pops up again, echoed by a formerly normal news anchor who seems to have been fully subsumed by our era's reality-TV aesthetic. (These are the poorly-sold histrionics of a Big Brother side-room interview, applied to coverage of a possible worldwide pandemic. Also, you'll notice there's no mention of the fact people are getting sick and dying. Won't someone think of The Stocks?) From the jump, the president and his apparatchiks have been baying that his critics are politicizing the novel coronavirus outbreak, turning a serious issue into an opportunity to score points. The Democrats just want to get him out of office, so they're misrepresenting the threat. The media hates him, so they're exaggerating everything. That might be true in some cases, but the reality is that the nation of Italy is now under complete lockdown. Are 60 million Italians in on The Hoax? Or is it possible that sometimes things happen in the world and the most important thing about them is not how they affect Donald Trump?

In fact, it's the president who is politicizing the outbreak by formulating the nation's response solely in terms of how it affects him politically. As a champion bullshitter suffering from pathological self-interest, perhaps he has genuinely convinced himself that because it's in his own interest to downplay the problem, it's in the national interest. But the fantasy world he's continually constructing around himself is beginning to show cracks as reality seeps in. It is not in the public's interest to drag our feet in terms of testing and preparing the nation's healthcare infrastructure for a significant shock, but that's what we've done. The head of the president's Coronavirus Task Force, Alex Azar, said on national television this morning that he has no idea how many Americans have been tested. What, dude?

By many different measures, the current regime is bungling the response. A Wall Street Journal examination of China's response indicates that what you do, and when, matters. It is not politicizing events to monitor the administration's activities and offer criticism where it's merited—it is the basic duty of any citizen. It is not cheap politics to question whether there's been a sufficiently effective response in the world's richest and most powerful country, and whether this may have something to do with the fact we installed a militantly ignorant game-show host as our president. He is unable to process the outbreak as a human issue affecting millions of people. It's just a PR problem affecting the only person that matters. Apparently, Trish Regan agrees. How many of her viewers are elderly, or otherwise susceptible to the virus she dismisses as an Impeachment Hoax?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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