Former Trump officials also said a big problem in his response is that he is not relying much on data but instead is using what he’s previously called “his very, very large brain.” At a briefing in mid-April, he pointed to his head when asked the metrics he would use to decide when to reopen the economy.

“He’s a gut guy that doesn’t like a lot of detail on stuff, so that’s why he runs with the hydroxychloroquine thing working because ‘Hey, that’s a good one, I have a good feeling about that,’” said a former senior Trump administration official.

Others are skeptical that Trump’s daily briefings are accomplishing anything positive for him any more and worry that they are backfiring by letting the president engage in his favorite sport: getting into arguments with reporters and attacking the media.

“He’s got two hours of material he’s got to fill every day in his show and will go with things before they’re fully baked,” said the former official. “They’ve kind of outlived their usefulness,” added a former White House official.

Most don’t think Trump, 73, has changed much as a person even with a 9/11-scale death toll every day in recent weeks, a scourge that has felled a close friend and inundated the Queens neighborhood where he grew up.

When asked whether Trump is a different person because of the virus, Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s short-lived communications director, said: “No way. This guy hasn’t changed one iota.”

Scaramucci added, one thing that has stayed consistent with Trump is what he cares about most: himself.

“There’s only one thing that he’s concerned about and you know what that is? It’s ‘TRUMP,’” he said, spelling out the letters for effect. “When he does a news search, he’s searching ‘TRUMP.’ He doesn’t search ‘USA,’ he searches ‘TRUMP.”

Three former officials said Trump is most worried about the economy, because the president believes he cannot win a second term if the U.S. enters a sustained downturn.

Trump studies his base religiously, several noted, and frequently shifts his rhetoric based on where he thinks his most reliable supporters are going.

There is also strong skepticism about whether he’s learned much if anything since the early days of the crisis, when he compared Covid-19 to the flu and predicted it would “disappear” like a “miracle.”

“Most people would say, ‘Yeah I learned from that, I learned not to jump out ahead, or to be so definitive on things’, but I don’t see any evidence of that,” said the former senior administration official. “He’s sort of doubled down [by saying] he’s handled this thing perfectly well and I’m not sure whether he learns in the same way that other people might.”

Republicans close to the White House are worried that Democrats will use Trump’s dismissive early comments against him; some of them are already appearing in early ads by Democratic groups.

In the latest example, this week Trump hauled Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in front of reporters to say he hadn’t meant to warn that an outbreak of the disease in the fall would likely be “worse” — only that it could be made more difficult by the onset of flu season. But the president went further, declaring the virus “might not come back at all,” in comments that could haunt him later.