It’s hard to imagine a worse performance than Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic now sweeping the globe.

If one had to conjure up a scenario of a leader bungling a key test — nothing less than the health and economic well-being of his people — you couldn’t do better than to describe what Trump has actually done since COVID-19 emerged in January.

This matters, and not just to Americans who have the misfortune of being directly governed by his administration.

It matters for the whole world, since Trump’s failure to inspire any sort of confidence has further tanked financial markets and made the prospect of a world-wide recession even more likely.

And it particularly matters for Canadians, who share a long border with the United States and will inevitably have to face repercussions if the coronavirus starts to spread widely south of the border, in part at least because of Trump’s near-criminal mishandling of the crisis.

All this came into sharp focus on Wednesday evening when the president addressed the American people from the Oval Office in an attempt to reassure them about how the administration is dealing with COVID-19, and to calm the markets.

He failed on both counts, and spectacularly so.

Even as Trump spoke, futures markets started to plummet, signalling a deep lack of trust that the national leadership of the United States is on top of the situation.

After downplaying the crisis for weeks, Trump suddenly imposed a travel ban from Europe. And he managed to make a series of outright misstatements — at one point seeming to include trade goods from Europe in the ban before reversing himself in a tweet shortly after.

It was a pathetic performance, even by Trump’s appallingly low standards. But it was in line with what is now a two-month record of lies, distortion and politically motivated attacks on anyone who dares to criticize the U.S. response to COVID-19.

For weeks he dismissed the threat, brushing it off as just a type of flu (scientists say it’s actually much more deadly). He said he had a “hunch” that the death rate would be much lower than the experts predicted, claiming he just has a “natural ability” to suss out that kind of thing.

The coronavirus tests that he said were “perfect” turn out to be unavailable to thousands of Americans desperately trying to get themselves tested for the disease.

The United States, which boasts that it has the best medical system in the world, has fallen shockingly short under Trump’s leadership of the standards for testing set in such countries as Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

All along, Trump has treated the emerging coronavirus crisis not as a threat to public health and the American economy, but as a political threat to him personally, and to his “narrative” about how well things have gone since he entered the White House.

And so it is, in two main ways.

The shocking drop in the markets portends a downturn in the economy that will shatter the idea that, despite Trump’s personal crassness, he has “made America great again.”

And his clearly incompetent and politically motivated handling of the COVID-19 threat is shaking even many of those who were willing to stick with him for partisan reasons.

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That includes some conservatives, not just those who long ago wrote him off. Watching the president’s Wednesday evening performance, Rod Dreher of The American Conservative wrote that “even when Trump is trying to be on his best behavior, he just doesn’t have much of a clue about the nature of the crisis.”

Because Trump is in the White House, more Americans will almost certainly die from the coronavirus and the U.S. economy will be hit harder than it might have been with surer leadership.

For the rest of us, that will make it just that much more difficult to navigate our way through the crisis.

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