Or perhaps you wonder why their boss, President Trump, has lied so transparently about the severity of the epidemic — including by proclaiming that an early count of 15 confirmed U.S. cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” (More than 600 people have since been diagnosed.)

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All of which is to say: Why isn’t the Trump administration even the tiniest bit forward-looking? Don’t these people realize they’ll look foolish when, within days or hours or even minutes, their confident decrees are proved wrong?

Alas, this is what happens when an administration governs like there’s no tomorrow.

The most important lesson Trump learned from both his business days and his political career is that there are no consequences. Ever. For anything. He can lie. He can cheat. He can move goal posts. He can break his promises about deficits or who will pay for the wall. He can renege on international trade deals or private contracts for chandeliers.

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Yet he never pays a penalty, at least not politically. His followers forgive and forget.

Understandably, then, he behaves like the protagonist in “Groundhog Day” (at least in the first part of the film): He does whatever he expects to bring the biggest short-term payoff today, since he can count on a reset tomorrow.

Unfortunately for those he governs, the president has become almost pathologically incapable of thinking about the future. The problem isn’t that he merely plays down the value of tomorrow; he behaves as if tomorrow doesn’t exist. In economic terms, you could say he has a discount factor of zero.

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Or in layman’s terms: This is the YOLO presidency.

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That’s the easiest way to explain why Trump and his staff seem reluctant to level with Americans and advise them to take precautions and avoid risky activities — such as flights or campaign rallies if you’re elderly. It’s how you explain why Trump has played down the risks of going to work while ill. And why he’s celebrated coronavirus counts kept artificially low by shortages of test kits, or a cruise ship held at sea.

Sure, such rhetoric might foreseeably decrease adaptive behaviors and increase the spread of the epidemic — thereby also increasing political liabilities for Trump.

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But perhaps it’ll juice markets just a little bit today, and today is all that matters.

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Of course, it’s possible that administration officials are just cockeyed optimists, preternaturally disposed to minimize mortal threats. This would seem at odds with all their past fearmongering over imagined dangers.

Or perhaps they’re not trying to mislead; rather, they’re genuinely ill-informed or incapable of making accurate, real-time risk assessments. Then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney couldn’t have known that his Conservative Political Action Conference audience was being exposed to coronavirus at the very moment he denounced media coverage of the illness as a conspiracy to bring down the president. But maybe he also lacked the wherewithal to think of this obvious possibility.

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More likely, they just don’t care about the risks of saying something unreliable and wrong, because risks are by definition about the future.

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Trumpworld is clearly counting on being able to change their narrative again on a dime, as they always have before. In a news conference on Monday evening, Trump said some “very major” economic measures will be coming, after implying in a tweet just hours earlier that the economy was not at risk. The White House seems to assume that tomorrow — when Americans confront indisputable evidence that more people are falling ill and dying, and that concerns about the epidemic weren’t part of some “Fake News” hoax to bring down the president — Trump can offer up a new narrative or scapegoat.

In fact, Trump has already begun testing out scapegoats. At a recent White House event, he essentially argued that there is no crisis, but if there were one, it would definitely be former president Barack Obama’s fault.

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Perhaps MAGA supporters will once again come along for the ride. In the meantime, markets may continue to fall. People will still get sick. Some of them will die.

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As Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric continues to threaten both the economy and public health, we befuddled critics will keep asking: Okay, but what about tomorrow? And Trump’s response will pretty much continue to be: What is tomorrow?