Donald Trump is still not taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously. And I don’t mean he isn’t anxious about it, or that he’s still pretending it’s a hoax perpetrated by Democrats. He’s turned the corner on that, because even those of his supporters who favor aluminum headwear are beginning to see irrefutable signs that COVID-19 is real and spreading.

But he does not, in any meaningful sense, understand the gravity of the problem. Or he is willfully ignoring it in a haze of narcissistic magical thinking, the radius of which extends to much of the executive staff. He demonstrated this on Wednesday when he put his xenophobic senior adviser Stephen Miller and his expertise-free son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of developing and articulating the White House’s response to the pandemic, which he delayed announcing until it had Kushner’s seal of approval.

Neither Kushner nor Miller has any expertise on pandemics, emergency response, or anything that would qualify either of them to be involved in that process on an even cursory basis. I am particularly sensitive to Kushner’s woeful inadequacies on this front because I’m a former editor-in-chief of a newspaper he owns, and he was once my boss, back when he was nominally a Democrat and his father-in-law was still pretending to fire people on TV. I’ve written about what he was like to work for elsewhere. The short version is that Jared Kushner is incurious, not inclined to defer to experts, and surrounds himself with yes men, so he is unaccustomed to being told that his decision-making is bad. He believes his capabilities far exceed what they are, and his assessment is reinforced by the people around him who are paid to tell him that. In this sense, he is not unlike his father-in-law. And we now know that his “research” consisted in part of asking Kurt Kloss (the father of his sister-in-law, supermodel Karlie Kloss) to crowdsource recommendations on Facebook, a platform better known for distributing decontextualized memes and misinformation than expert knowledge.

Miller, for his part, has no ostensible expertise in anything except injecting racism into any policy the White House puts out and writing speeches that display the rhetorical mastery of the average seventh-grade book report. His signature contributions to the administration are consistently advocating for cruelty to immigrant children and promoting white nationalism from the Oval Office. He has been one of the few Trump advisers to stick around over the course of Trump’s term, but it’s easy to see why: There’s no moral bar too low for Miller to limbo his way underneath. His entire purpose in the administration appears to be to translate xenophobia into executable public policy.

If the White House regards Miller and Kushner as the smartest guys in the room on this issue, it says less about their intelligence than the state of the room. Addressing a pandemic is a Herculean effort even in an administration staffed with competent experts, which is not the one we have. It requires specialized knowledge, an understanding of epidemiology and large-scale emergency response, and real experience in dealing with outbreaks. Trump has rejected all of those things and the people who might offer them, and instead has deferred to the amateur analysis of Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, with oversight from senior pandemic amateur Vice President Mike Pence, whose only prior experience handling a viral outbreak resulted in a catastrophic increase in HIV in Indiana.

All of this is intentional because Trump cannot or will not wrap his addled brain around the idea that this is anything more than a political problem. We saw this in his speech on Wednesday. He looked uncomfortable, nervous, even, as he read with some difficulty, what Miller and Kushner had written for him. In the course of the speech, he insinuated that China was responsible for the virus, an inevitability given Miller’s bigotry, and instituted a partial travel ban for people coming from Europe. These racist dog whistles, like much of what Trump communicates externally, are designed to signal to parts of his base that their own xenophobia is justified and that the disastrous response to the pandemic so far can be pinned on people who are not American, and not white, and most importantly, not Trump.