Trump warned that the next two weeks will be “very, very painful.” (Why two weeks? Won’t deaths continue as the virus rolls through one metropolitan area after another?) Certainly, only an uninformed fabulist would think everything would be better by Easter:

Trump used to say no one could have predicted the coronavirus. Now, the right-wing talking point is that impeachment, which ended the at beginning of February, kept him too distracted. So it was knowable, but Trump did not know it?

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That does not match Trump’s earlier statements and numerous media accounts that senior advisers warned of the impending threat. The Post reports that fails to “take into account the president’s own words and actions related to the coronavirus.” Recall:

Trump repeatedly played down the threat the virus posed toward the United States. When news of the first U.S. case broke in late January, Trump declared, “We have it totally under control. . . . It’s going to be just fine.” At the same time, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was calling on the federal government to declare the crisis a public health emergency. Democrats also criticized the Trump administration in early February for not taking the crisis seriously enough, with some warning that medical institutions were in urgent need of additional staff and supplies. Amid the first reports of community transmission in late February, Trump continued to dismiss the risk. “It’s going to disappear,” he said. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Moreover, Trump had plenty of time to tweet, play golf and hold rallies throughout January and February.

But, as he so often does, Trump blew up the spin from his own allies. He declared on Tuesday, "I don’t think I would have done any better if I had not been impeached.” He added: “I don’t think I would have acted any differently, or I don’t think I would have acted any faster.” All that shilling for Trump did not survive the day.

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Try as he might to now prepare the country and figure out an excuse for massive casualties potentially on a scale not seen since World War II, Trump’s own statements and failure to take action cannot be entirely erased from memory. He would like us to think “some people” just thought we could “ride this out,” but not him! Well, he actually was the one who told us it would all disappear one day. Trump would like us to think that 100,000 to 240,000 (the range of the administration’s own projected casualties) would be a stunning achievement for him because doing nothing would have resulted in many more deaths.

This line of reasoning is both misleading (had he acted as he should we might have kept casualties to a much lower level, as South Korea did) and morally obnoxious. It will be of no comfort to the widows and orphans when the president says there could have been more widows and orphans.

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One reason the president freaks out whenever a reporter quotes Trump back to Trump is that the record is littered with statements from him (and his right-wing sycophants) downplaying the danger of covid-19 and characterizing the pandemic as a figment of the anti-Trump media’s imagination. The gap between Trump’s words just a week or so ago and the horrible reality about to confront the country is unspinnable.

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His resistance to a nationwide stay-at-home order and unsupportable arguments that as many people would die from suicide in the case of enforced isolation as the coronavirus look like the product of denial and willful ignorance.

The problem for Trump continues even now. With every utterance — denying a shortage of tests, questioning the need for ventilators — he creates a new string of embarrassing quotes that also will clash with reality. The bottom line: Nothing can excuse the incompetence and ignorance that will make the death toll higher than that of other countries whose leaders acted more swiftly.