President Donald Trump is blowing the coronavirus response because he can't take bad news. It is a trait he developed over a long business career of faking success.

And it is why, from the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in January, Trump downplayed its severity and importance.

He's still doing it. In a call with governors this week, he denied there was any shortage of coronavirus test kits. There still is.

This inability to cope with bad news got us into this pandemic mess in the first place. Reality will get us out of it.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

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President Donald Trump has never had a good relationship with reality. In fact, throughout his business career it's clear that the harder things got, the more he was inclined to make circumstances seem rosier than they actually were, to lie.

It is a deadly way to do things in a crisis, especially one like the coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that in a phone conference between the White House and state governors, Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana said his state would run out of coronavirus test kits in a day. Instead of offering help, Trump responded by shutting Bullock down and saying he hadn't heard about a problem with test kits in weeks. Someone at the meeting recorded the exchange.

Reality is on Bullock's side. The number of coronavirus tests the US is conducting daily has leveled off, suggesting the states where the virus is headed haven't ramped up testing enough. There are major operational issues preventing the scaling of testing to a level that could help broadly identify those infected with the coronavirus. The federal government is not helping this situation, and all of that is making the crisis worse.

But Trump doesn't want to hear that.

Trump's denial at this meeting was then bolstered and amplified by his enablers. The White House spokesman Hogan Gidley described the call by saying "the governors praised President Trump's leadership." In Trump world, the call was a lovefest. In reality, it was yet another horrifying vignette in this long national nightmare.

Trump is not going to suddenly embrace reality and facts. He's never done it. When the Central Park Five were exonerated of murder he would not apologize for taking out a full-page newspaper ad calling for their execution. He's always lied about this wealth, even losing a libel lawsuit he brought against a journalist who tried to correct the record. Reality has never stopped Donald Trump from lying even when the truth was obvious.

And it does not get more obvious than hundreds of Americans dying every single day.

Accentuate the factual

Trump's evolution on the coronavirus has been painfully slow. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, back in January he assured CNBC that it wouldn't be a problem for the US.

When the virus got to the US he assured the country that it would not spread. Now that it's spread, he vacillates between trusting the medical experts working on pandemic policy and acquiescing to the business interests that would have him end social distancing, open up the country, and condemn thousands to death for lack of hospital capacity.

Trump has shown himself willing to believe unproven information about the virus as long as it's positive, and that has terrifying consequences. For example, after he publicly touted an antimalarial drug unproven to treat COVID-19, an Arizona man tried to take a form of it as treatment and died. Certainly people shouldn't be self-medicating with random chemicals, but right now people are scared, and having a president who is careless with facts and truth means that desperate people are being fed a diet of delusion.

Trump's rosy outlook served him well in business. Back in 2009 when his Atlantic City, New Jersey, casinos went bankrupt he was able to wrest control over them by telling an extremely-positive-bordering-on-unbelievable story about how he could bring them back to life. They were bankrupt again by 2011.

When Trump does have moments of intimacy with reality he is liable to quickly walk them back. This week Trump acknowledged downplaying the danger of the coronavirus, saying: "I knew everything. I knew it could be horrible, I knew it could be maybe good ... I don't want to be a negative person."

Then on Wednesday he went back to saying the pandemic was a problem no one could have foreseen.

Perhaps appropriately, the disinclination to share bad news with the powers that be is what turned the coronavirus into a pandemic in the first place. According to reports, China has a good system for reporting viral threats, but the system failed because no one wanted to report the coronavirus. No one wanted to deliver bad news to Beijing, and because of that the virus was able to spread.

We need facts to fight this virus — facts about what it is, how quickly it spreads, why it emerged, and where it's going. If we don't have good data on that, we're fumbling in the dark. And if we don't have a leader who is willing to accept that data, we'll be in the dark for quite a while.