We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this. I think that we’ve achieved all the different milestones that are needed. So the federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story, and I think that’s really what needs to be told.

In this “great success story,” more than a million Americans have contracted covid-19 and 59,000 have died, far more than in any other country on earth. (And those are the official numbers; the real totals are almost certainly much higher).

Meanwhile, the key to both containing the virus and allowing us to safely resume economic and social activity — widespread testing that will allow us to identify and isolate those who carry the virus — has been an abysmal failure. Just this week, months after the pandemic began sweeping across the country, the administration finally got around to releasing a plan to increase testing, a plan that mostly tells states that it’s their responsibility. We’re still conducting only a fraction of the tests we need.

“I’m very confident that we have all the testing we need to start opening the country,” Kushner nevertheless told the Trump hype squad on “Fox & Friends.”

The president and those who work for him clearly believe that if they simply repeat over and over again that everything is going great, the public will believe it. They have other subsidiary arguments — no one could have predicted the arrival of a pandemic, it’s actually Barack Obama’s fault — but at the core is the contention that Trump’s leadership on the pandemic has been masterful and we should all be applauding his extraordinary performance.

This will be an excellent case study in the power of the president and his party to create an alternate reality. But there’s one reason it will be difficult: The administration doesn’t control the flow of information.

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In other contexts, the president has had more power to fool the public — when he could exercise greater control over what they learned. For instance, when George W. Bush and his administration set about to convince the public that Saddam Hussein was about to attack us with his fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that lie was challenging to disprove, at least for a while. It was difficult to see into Iraq much of the information even journalists were able to access came filtered through the very government that was mounting what turned out to be a spectacularly successful propaganda campaign.

But today, the Trump administration has no such control. We don’t need classified intelligence materials or brave whistle-blowers to know what’s happening with the pandemic. The daily death toll is available for anyone to see. We get reports from all over the country about hospitals that don’t have sufficient personal protective equipment, “essential workers” forced to do jobs that have become dangerous and the heartbreaking stories of lives lost.

Which is why the administration’s effort to convince us that this has been a smashing success aren’t working — though we have to be careful about what it means for this effort to “work.” Polls are showing approval for Trump’s handling of the pandemic similar to his approval ratings overall, in the 40s, which suggests that if Trump is your guy you’ll say he’s doing a good job, and if he isn’t, you won’t.

At the same time, state governors — especially those who have acted aggressively to impose lockdowns — have seen their approval shoot into the 70s or even 80s. Meanwhile, overwhelming majorities of the public in poll after poll reject the line being pushed by the administration that everything is under control and we’ll soon be able to resume normal activity. For instance, 79 percent of Americans in this poll believe a second wave of infections is likely, 80 percent in this poll say it’s a bad idea to reopen restaurants, and 82 percent in this poll say current restrictions are either appropriate or not strict enough.

Yet from now until November, the administration, the Trump campaign and Trump himself will continue to insist that his management of the pandemic has been positively awe-inspiring, no matter how high the death toll climbs. The media apparatus that supports him, centered on Fox News but also including conservative talk radio and web publications, will echo that claim.

They know that they don’t have to fool everyone. The experience of 2016 taught Trump that he could still win even if most Americans disliked him. At the end of that campaign, Gallup polls showed 61 percent of Americans with an unfavorable view of Trump (compared with 52 percent for Hillary Clinton). Yet a constellation of unpredictable factors enabled him to prevail in the electoral college even as Clinton got 3 million more votes.

Anyone with a commitment to reality might wish that at some point all Americans would agree that the president has failed and continues to fail, with tragic consequences. But that won’t happen. His supporters will close their eyes and insist that 2+2=5, the moon is made of green cheese and Trump has done a great job on this pandemic. They may not be a majority, but Trump is hoping there are just enough of them to keep him afloat.