Presidential administrations famously chafe under media scrutiny. Bush the Second? Hated it. Obama? Not a fan! Too itchy! The media, all of it, is always asking questions and poking around, and these guys don’t love it. But what happens when a man who’s suffered from a persecution complex since birth takes a job that only ever exists under a microscope? It’s fine! Good even. It goes well. Take this latest business with the coronavirus. Trump has been very okay about the media’s take on his response to the virus’s spread. Bet he hasn’t been watching television in days.

Instead it’s his volunteer P.R. team that’s up in arms. Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, for example wrote an op-ed lauding the president’s appointment of Vice President Mike Pence over the outbreak in the U.S. (There are currently 60 confirmed cases here, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that about 82,000 cases of the coronavirus have been clocked worldwide, with about 2,800 deaths.) He said in a follow-up on Fox News that the president “could personally suck the virus out of every one of the 60,000 people in the world, and suck it out of their lungs, swim to the bottom of the ocean and spit it out, and he would be accused of pollution for messing up the ocean if he did that.”

And you know what? Huckabee’s absolutely right. If he did that, the media would very much say, “That was pretty weird, huh? A little too Dementor-y for my tastes.” And the media wouldn’t stop there. If Trump used Tweezerman tweezers to pluck up each little bacteria one by one and then placed them in Elon Musk’s spaceship and shot the disease to Mars, we’d probably say, “Why did you spend so much money on that billionaire’s big blastoff, huh?” If Trump kissed every person in America with lips covered in antibacterial ointment, we’d say, “Please, please stop kissing everyone, Mr. President. My God!”

If Trump created a bigger and badder disease in a lab and put it in a cup and then pretended to spill it on, like, Jim Acosta’s head, but then stopped at the last minute and said, “Oop! Ha ha. Gotcha!,” we’d say, “This isn’t helping to distract us! It’s honestly making things a lot worse!”

None of these are great plans even though they sound really good and smart because it’s all secondary to a pretty plain one. Reiterate that Americans shouldn’t panic, but they should wash their hands, and perhaps prepare to stay indoors for awhile. Then the media would say, “Wow, that guy is acting curiously presidential.” Or something!

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