No wonder that he was leaning on aides not to cancel recently scheduled campaign events in Colorado, Wisconsin and Nevada until the very last minute, and that his advisers had to prevail on him not to announce another rally in Florida, tentatively scheduled for the end of the month. As we saw Wednesday night, if you put him in a room with only a teleprompter and a camera, he can barely make it out of a sentence alive.

And Trump has, as always, his enablers. Some of Trump’s boosters on talk radio and Fox News may slowly be conceding that the coronavirus is a greater public health threat than the garden-variety flu. (Not all, but some.) But immediately following his speech, Laura Ingraham was quick to challenge the wisdom of those who were preaching social distancing, implying, more or less, that it was an overreaction.

What about the small business owner, she asked, who’d get pummeled by it? What about our right to assemble? What if the cure is worse than the disease? “Where the risk is minimal, the business of America must go on,” she said, adding that closing down business “could end up being more catastrophic for America in the long term than this virus itself.”

Look: I’m not a doctor, and neither is Laura Ingraham. But public health experts are largely in agreement about this. If we don’t “flatten the curve” — which is to say, make sure our coronavirus patients come to our hospitals in manageable waves, rather than all at once — then we will soon become Italy, where doctors are now facing the possibility of wartime triage, which would require making choices about who lives and who dies based on a patient’s age, because there aren’t enough beds and ventilators to go around. (If you haven’t read Yascha Mounk’s vivid, data-driven piece in The Atlantic, do so, now.)

But rather than flattening the curve, Fox is behind the curve. Each and every time.

It is of course legitimate to worry about the fate of American businesses, large and small, and to fear for the short- and long-term security of American workers. But this swagger about carrying on business as usual goes beyond reflexive pro-Trump and pro-market reflexes.