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(via ‘A tweet can’t knock over a pandemic’: has Trump met his match in coronavirus? | World news | The Guardian)

It has killed thousands, sown widespread fear and disruption and caused the worst day for Wall Street since the 2008 financial crisis. One man, however, is not panicking about the coronavirus. Donald Trump just spent two successive days on the golf course.

Even for a US president who has made a habit of denialism – from global heating to the size of Barack Obama’s inauguration crowd – the current crisis is raising the bar. One headline on Monday described it as “Trump’s Chernobyl”, a reference to the Soviet nuclear disaster that authorities could not censor away.

The commander-in-chief’s past attempts to bend reality to his will have often been met with derision or mirth. But this time it is hardly an exaggeration to say thousands of lives are at stake. The international crisis that many feared would test his norm-busting presidency has arrived.

“Denial, accusation, distraction, lies – these are his four principal responses to any rival,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. “Only this time it’s not a person. When you think of that model, it doesn’t work with germs. A tweet doesn’t knock over a potential global pandemic.”

At a Fox News town hall last week, Trump was reminded that he is a “self-proclaimed germaphobe”. Blair added: “He’s been quite the germaphobe for many decades. One time I interviewed him he said: ‘You’re lucky I shook your hand.’ In the election campaign and Oval Office, it was hard for him to not shake hands but we can be sure there was a bottle of Purell nearby.”

Trump has contradicted experts to downplay the coronavirus threat, perhaps not least because it could hurt him in a presidential election year. He has inaccurately claimed that a vaccine will be available soon, that anyone who wants a test can get one and that the virus will be killed off by the spring weather. “A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat – as the heat comes in,” he said last month. “Typically, that will go away in April.”

And despite years of warnings from scientists that a pandemic would come someday, Trump has reduced the the White House national security staff and cut jobs addressing global pandemics. He has sought to portray the coronavirus as a bolt from the blue. “Who would have thought?” he asked during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. “Who would have thought we would even be having the subject?’”

When reality does not fit, Trump tries to find a workaround. Visiting the CDC while wearing a red “Keep America Great” cap, he suggested he would prefer that people exposed to the virus on a cruise ship be left aboard so they would not inflate the national total. “I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault … I’d rather have them stay on, personally.”

The blasé president spent the weekend playing golf in Florida, then began Monday fundraising for his re-election before making a fleeting appearance at a White House briefing. On Twitter, he continued to deny the impact of the virus on tumbling stocks: “Saudi Arabia and Russia are arguing over the price and flow of oil. That, and the Fake News, is the reason for the market drop!”  …