President Trump’s bombastic style has served him well through many stages of his political career, but as the coronavirus spreads rapidly throughout the United States, it is exposing how deeply unsuited he is to deal with a genuine crisis that he can’t bluff his way through.

It’s one thing for Trump to insist he had a “perfect” phone call and have all his Republican minions fall in line. It’s another thing to downplay a growing epidemic as more and more Americans get sick.

On Feb. 26, Trump patted himself on the back for the relatively low number of cases in the U.S. “You have 15 people, and the 15, within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done," he said. By March 5, he was tweeting that the U.S. had “only 129.” Just a day later, he said there were 240 cases, portraying this as a low number relative to the seasonal flu.

Sunday morning, he avoided stating any number in touting, “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus. We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!”

Story continues below

As of this writing, Johns Hopkins has tracked 428 cases in the U.S.

When Trump was elected, many of his critics feared that he could talk the U.S. into a nuclear war. Those fears have not been realized, as Trump has generally proven averse to military conflict — actually more averse than many of his predecessors. He’s also overcome a number of scandals through a combination of relentless attacks on the media and his political enemies and overreach among his opponents in both camps. But this is something different. Trump will be judged on his handling of the spread of a virus. And the outcome will be clear no matter how many things he makes up, no matter how confident he pretends to be, and no matter how many insults he heaves.

If anybody was hoping that Trump had the ability to rise to the moment, his comments upon touring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should disabuse them of that notion.

Trump, speaking from the facility with a red “Keep America Great” campaign hat, found time to praise the ratings of his town-hall interview on Fox News. He declared, “I don’t watch CNN because CNN is fake news.” He attacked Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is dealing with the most deadly coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., as a “snake.”

Dipping into the greatest hits from his impeachment defense, Trump said of the CDC tests that have run into significant problems: “The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right? This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good.”

When it came to the matter of testing, Trump also lied and revealed staggering ignorance. In the face of questions about the disastrously slow rollout of testing in the U.S., Trump insisted: “Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.”

That is not remotely true. There have been many stories of people’s futile efforts to try and get tested. Last Thursday, for instance, a registered nurse exhibiting symptoms in quarantine after having cared for a coronavirus patient wrote of her difficulty obtaining a test even after it was OK'd by a local health official.

Here in Washington, D.C., where the first case was announced Saturday, health officials said they had the capacity to test 50 people a day. There are currently restrictive criteria for who can get tested.

South Korea, in contrast, has set up drive-through centers, where individuals can get a sample taken in a few minutes without getting out of their cars, and get results back within a few days. This is exactly the sort of outside-the-box innovative solution that one would think a guy who ran as a practical businessman type would want to encourage or at least look into. Instead, Trump said: “They’re not testing. They’re sampling people in other countries.”

When a reporter interjected that those samples are then being tested, Trump said: “No, no — excuse me, there’s a difference. I heard what he said. They’re sampling people. It’s a drive-by. They give samples. Now, can we do that? Yeah, we can do that, but that’s not effective like what we’re doing.”

The lack of adequate testing may be keeping the numbers of identified cases artificially low in the U.S., but they are also preventing public health officials from being able to identify areas of outbreak early enough to take steps to mitigate the spread. The more that we can make the spread of the virus more gradual, the easier it will be to make sure that we have enough medical capacity to treat the cases of those who require hospitalization. From what we saw in China, the fatality rate is heavily correlated with how overwhelmed the medical system becomes.

But the most stunning part of Trump’s press conference came when he said that, despite the recommendation of health officials, he was reluctant to let Americans off of a cruise ship with 21 infected, because it would increase the reported numbers of cases. He said he would defer to the vice president, and there is now news that the passengers will be let off.

Yet it was quite revealing into Trump’s thought process that he said: “I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship. That wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship, either.”

Trump appears to be more concerned with numbers that might make him look bad in the short-term than he is with actually taking the most prudent measures to save lives over time.

The current crisis is revealing what many critics feared in a potential Trump presidency. He simply has not shown an ability to break out of his typical antics and treat the moment with the seriousness with which it deserves.