As the deadly coronavirus sweeps across the planet, holding entire cities and packed cruise ships hostage and claiming thousands of lives, many blame China’s authoritarian government for exacerbating the spread of a global pandemic that originated there by concealing crucial information from its own people and downplaying the scale of the outbreak. President Xi Jingping and his regime silenced doctors and citizen journalists who tried to sound the alarm about the disease until it spun out of their control.

Yet, instead of using this disaster as a cautionary tale, President Donald Trump seems hell-bent on repeating it. Last Thursday, Trump contradicted the statements of his own health officials and bizarrely asserted that the coronavirus—which had just started to spread into the United States—was already nearly eradicated here. “When you have [infected] 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” he boasted in a press conference. He declared that Democrats’ concerns about the virus were “the new hoax” to score political points against him.

Those comments proved dangerously false. Just a week later, more than 200 people are now confirmed to have the coronavirus in the U.S. (the real number is probably much higher, considering the dire lack of adequate testing), and the death toll has risen to 12. And Trump is still spreading misinformation about the disease.

He denied the World Health Organization’s death rate on a “hunch” this week, implied the pandemic is no worse than a seasonal flu, and suggested it was fine for sick people to go to work. He falsely blamed the Obama Administration for the country’s lack of testing capacity, demanded health officials coordinate messaging with the White House before communicating information about the coronavirus to the public, and put his notoriously anti-science Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the response—the same man who horribly mismanaged and worsened an HIV crisis as governor of Indiana, said “smoking doesn’t kill,” and still believes in conversion therapy for LGBTQ people. The president falsely claimed a vaccine was just a couple months away (scientists says it’s more than a year away) and that the coronavirus would disappear when the weather warms up “like a miracle,” and he suggested (and then backed off on) shutting down the Southern border to stem the outbreak, even though it clearly wasn’t coming in from Mexico.

By Thursday evening, Trump was trying to spin the coronavirus as a good thing for the American economy. "I have to say, people are now staying in the United States, spending their money in the US,” he said in a Fox News town hall, “and I like that." (In fact, the epidemic is wreaking havoc on the stock market, and any boost from Americans spending money here is surely offset by all the people being kept out by quarantines and travel restrictions.)

In case Trump’s autocratic tendencies weren’t already clear from his attempted extortion of Ukraine, the pardoning of his criminal allies, and his unprecedented takeover of the justice department, his handling of the spiraling coronavirus epidemic is straight out of the authoritarian’s playbook.

“Trump, like other authoritarians, is not into transparency or accountability,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and an expert on authoritarians. “What matters to him most of all is loyalty and ratings. He has persisted in disclosing things to the public that are not true and consistently sidelined the experts so the stock market won’t fall. He doesn’t want the truth to get out. And it’s the public who pays the price.”