It’s hard to even know where to begin when it comes to tracking the right-wing media response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

For weeks, conservative coverage of the virus has flailed from one extreme to the other. One moment, anybody expressing concern about the virus is part of a plot to take down the president; the next, it’s a very serious threat we’re being protected from only through the courageous and decisive leadership of President Donald Trump. This inconsistency -- something of a Schrödinger’s pandemic treatment of the virus as both a national threat and an overhyped tool to take down the president -- lays bare the singular goal of the modern right-wing media ecosystem: Protect Trump at all costs.

Right-wing media and the Trump administration downplayed the growing crisis for months.

For a while, right-wing media figures did their best to downplay the threat posed by the virus, putting them in lockstep with the Trump administration, which took little action within the first two months of the virus’s spread. While mainstream media outlets covered the threat of a coronavirus pandemic seriously, pro-Trump media mocked the reporting as liberal hysteria meant to damage the economy, a metric that Trump and his supporters have repeatedly pointed to as a measure of his success. By late January, the stock market began to feel the effects of the virus. As early cases began to pop up in the U.S., the stock market reflected the fear and uncertainty people had started to wrestle with.

Pro-Trump media then leaned hard into efforts to convince the public that the virus’s threat was overhyped and that market losses were the fault of Democrats or the press. On February 25, Fox News host Laura Ingraham claimed that China was using the virus to “hurt Trump in his reelection.” On February 26, right-wing radio host Mark Levin called Democrats “diabolical” for “using health issues to create health scares.” Fox Business host Trish Regan called the crisis “yet another attempt to impeach the president” by Democrats and accused “many in the liberal media” of “using, and I mean using, coronavirus in an attempt to demonize and destroy the president.” Trump himself referred to coverage about how serious this virus could be as a “hoax” meant to take him down, a message dutifully repeated by Fox & Friends Weekend co-hosts. Fox’s Pete Hegseth said he believed that Democrats and mainstream media were “rooting for coronavirus to spread.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration made it extremely difficult for someone to get tested for the coronavirus. If people can’t get tested, they can’t be diagnosed with it; if they can’t be diagnosed with it, they can’t contribute to an increase in reported cases. The number of coronavirus patients in the U.S. was kept artificially low, as Politico’s Dan Diamond said on the March 12 edition of NPR’s Fresh Air: