On Wednesday evening, President Donald Trump held a rare press conference in the White House briefing room to address the administration’s response to COVID-19. During this press conference, Trump made a number of false or misleading claims about the coronavirus and U.S. preparedness -- and it wasn’t the first time his administration had done so.

Though Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Tuesday that the question of whether the virus would spread was “not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” Trump insisted that he didn’t think it was inevitable and the risk to Americans was “very low.”

Though Trump claimed that a vaccine would be made available “in a fairly quick manner,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it would be at least a year to 18 months before the public could expect a vaccine. Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus by emphasizing its similarities to the flu -- there are some, but coronavirus is still very dangerous -- and claiming that the number of cases is “going very substantially down, not up.” (In fact, in the days since Trump delivered his remarks, dozens of new coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the U.S.)

At another point in the press conference, Trump blamed the Democratic debate for this week’s stock market nosedive even though the debate didn’t take place until after two straight days of declines, and he called Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “‘Crying’ Chuck Schumer.”

Trump’s rambling address and responses to reporter questions were, World Health Organization adviser Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel said, “incoherent.” But you wouldn’t get that impression from a lot of the event’s media coverage.

Media outlets projected an image of a competent president in control and ready for the looming disaster. This didn’t match reality.

Reporters and the outlets they represent were eager to take Trump at his word that the U.S. was “ready” for the virus, quoting him in headlines and tweets without explaining the many reasons to be concerned about the country's preparedness. In May 2018, Trump ousted Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer, the National Security Council’s senior director for global health security and biodefense, eliminating his position and undercutting the country’s pandemic response team. Even so, outlets like CNN and Bloomberg ran headlines reassuring the public that matters were under control. An article in The Guardian echoed his assertion that coronavirus spread is not inevitable.