Fauci was tactful, and did what is required these days, prefacing some answers with praise for Trump’s decisive decisions.

But read between the lines and you can see that Fauci offered a devastating indictment of the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Fauci was asked point-blank whether our failure to act earlier to mitigate the spread of coronavirus has put the United States on track to see a spike in infections similar to that in Italy.

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He declined to directly answer.

Layers of Trump pathologies

We are in an extraordinary situation that is deeply colored by multiple layers of Trump pathologies. For weeks, the president has exerted a black-hole-like negative pull on the government’s response by vastly minimizing and lying about the threat for deeply cynical purposes, which has led health officials to mislead the public and fail to act with necessary urgency.

At the same time, Trump is, in effect, completely absent from the conversation about what the federal response that is actually taking shape right now needs to look like — to the degree there is one at all.

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With the country desperate for answers and leadership, all Trump can do is spread his magical lying and chaos pixie dust everywhere, all to fog over his own emperor-with-no-clothes inability to supply either amid a public emergency happening in the immediate here and now.

Into this vacuum stepped Fauci on “Morning Joe,” to try to create an impression of calm leadership where there isn’t any.

‘Things are going to get worse’

Fauci offered a brief tutorial on epidemics, noting that cases suddenly spike as they gather exponential steam. He added that such a “peak” can be mitigated into a “hump” by intervention — limiting travel from outside, and “containment and mitigation” to prevent internal spread, such as testing, treatment and social distancing.

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“Obviously what you’re going to see is an acceleration of cases,” Fauci acknowledged, adding: “Things are going to get worse before they get better.”

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Fauci did deliver some good news. He said he believes testing for coronavirus is set to ramp up in a major way in coming weeks, noting extensive new involvement by the private sector.

But Fauci was vague on the impact this ramped-up testing would have. As he put it: “Hopefully we’ll be able to blunt that peak.”

Hopefully.

The Italy comparison

This is where it gets ugly. "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough pointed out that models have suggested we’re on a path similar to that of Italy, which is currently reports more than 10,000 cases. Experts have noted that weeks of delays in testing in the United States have made its response one of the worst in the world.

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Scarborough directly asked Fauci whether we “started early enough” with “aggressive containment” to “avoid that peak that Italy is experiencing.”

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Fauci replied by praising Trump’s decisions to limit travel from China early and more recently from Europe. But he avoided directly answering whether we’d started our mitigation efforts early enough, saying we must “continue” with them.

What Fauci did not say is: Yes, we started our response early enough to avoid the peak that Italy is experiencing.

“Working with many of the people who are watching this most closely, I don’t know of anyone who thinks there’s a good reason why we would not end up in a very similar position to Italy within two weeks,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and a former Obama administration official, told me.

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“What is infuriating is that this was a very real possibility as soon as we saw what happened in Wuhan in January,” Konyndyk continued. “We could have been preparing for this for two months.”

A devastating indictment

Fauci has acknowledged that the United States is “failing” on the testing front. Konyndyk told me that this, combined with Fauci’s tactful refusal to say whether we’re on Italy’s path, amount to both an “acknowledgment of obvious realities” and a “devastating indictment.”

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Separately, during the “Morning Joe” segment, Fauci strongly suggested that Trump himself should be getting tested for the virus, which Trump is refusing to do, despite his close contact with a Brazilian official who has himself tested positive.

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Fauci was asked whether theoretically any person (like Trump) who learns he stood next to someone who has tested positive should get tested. Fauci replied in the unequivocal affirmative, while carefully saying the decision should be left to Trump’s personal physician.

This is not a small matter. If Trump got tested for coronavirus, it would signal to the country that he’s taking it seriously:

But as many have speculated, Trump may not be doing this because he’s trapped in a place where he simply cannot acknowledge the seriousness of what’s happening, after having dismissed it for so long. Fauci left zero doubt that Trump should get tested. But the president isn’t.

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Officials such as Fauci are in an admittedly difficult spot. As he himself has also acknowledged, telling the country the truth while keeping the principal happy is a difficult balancing act.

This particular principal — that is, Trump — has turned that balancing act into a monumentally more difficult task, one akin to tightrope-walking in a hurricane. And we have no idea how bad the consequences could get.