Trump Can’t Even Imitate a Normal President

By the end of the briefing, Trump’s imperfect imitation of a typical president had slipped: Asked about a potential new drug cocktail that he had tweeted about earlier in the day, Trump declared, “I feel very good about it”—leaving Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has become the public face of the administration’s pandemic response, to diplomatically acknowledge that the president was engaging in magical thinking. Trump had a moment during which—if you ignored the distinctive sound of his voice, you could almost imagine that you were listening to someone other than Trump. By Monday, Trump had lurched away from his own administration’s messaging on the coronavirus, writing on Twitter, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF” and insisting during a disjointed evening press conference that most people should soon go back to work in order to prevent economic damage—even though public- health experts warn that this would dramatically worsen the pandemic and cause a wave of preventable deaths.