According to Greg Sargent of the Washington Post, from the moment we first heard of the Coronavirus in China, until today with the markets crashing and businesses closing, Trump has consistently sought to tell everyone that things are fine indeed that much of it is going perfectly. But Americans are hearing differently on their phones and televisions, they are hearing reality, and the reporting on that reality now has Trump furious. Trump is angry that the media is not reporting the fantastic news all around us. Trump believes the media owes him “propaganda,” they owe it to Trump to help him look good.

The Fake and Corrupt News never called Google. They said this was not true. Even in times such as these, they are not truthful. Watch for their apology, it won’t happen. More importantly, thank you to Google! https://t.co/AuvpbXNouW

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2020

According to Sargent:

Trump is now raging at the media for reporting on his botched claims about Google’s plans for a new website to steer people to testing options. Trump dramatically overpromised in this regard, forcing Google to scale down the expectations he had created.

As with all things, it is never Trump’s issue. It couldn’t be that Trump alone screwed-up the press conference. It had to be that the media got the message all wrong, not that Trump came out half-cocked.

The problem goes deeper, though, now that the media won’t play Trump’s propaganda game with the virus, he wants his followers to distrust the media’s coverage of the virus, and listen only to Trump. Would he ever lie to you?

But also note Trump’s declaration that, in a larger sense, the media is not being truthful at a time of crisis. Trump is using his megaphone to tell the American people not to trust an institution they must rely on for information amid an ongoing public health emergency, all because that institution held him accountable for his own failures on this front.

It is always about Trump’s well-being. Even in an epidemic, it will be about Trump’s well-being. He is mad that the media has exposed him as a fraud and an incompetent, so he then turns his followers against the media – something dangerous in normal times, catastrophic in an emergency when we do need to have a direct line of communication with people who can be trusted.

The relentless effort to discredit the very same news media that’s informing the public where he will not, and imposing a form of accountability on Trump that he would never dream of imposing on himself, is of a piece with all that. And we can only guess at how many people will be deceived and misled, at exactly the moment when they need good information the most.

Trump has never once tried to make good in a world where he could simply tell the truth, do a good job, and win. Trump doesn’t believe in “winning” without someone else “losing.” It makes Trump uniquely incompetent in managing a crisis like this. Trump cannot conceive of a situation where he heard about a terrifying global disease, told the truth about it, marshaled resources, stayed ahead of the game, did a fantastic job of fighting the virus and limiting damage and then worry about whether the media covered it fairly to him, winning by doing a great job and protecting people.

That is not how Trump operates. Trump operates from a position where he only gains through tricks, schemes, cons, always at someone else’s expense. Thus, Trump didn’t think to first shout from the mountain top that something bad was coming and he needed to rally all the resources needed, the type of response one expects of good leaders (never mind “great.”) No, Trump’s first instinct was to hide what was coming, to not let anyone know how bad it would be. That was how he would “win,” no one would know the “truth” about how bad the situation would be. He is still in that mode, trying to trick his way through this, acting as though we’re much further ahead in this than we are.

The media, as (ideally) a neutral arbiter is thus Trump’s natural enemy. The media makes it harder to “trick” people because the media – generally – will tell the truth. Now the battle is set, between a media that rightfully sees itself as providing Americans information that will keep them alive, and the man who has always believed that information is only good if it can be manipulated to “win.”

The coronavirus is the most foreign of problems for Trump. He doesn’t know how to react in a world where either everyone wins or everyone loses. He doesn’t know how to do politics unless he is “beating” someone. He cannot organize a strategy without having a human enemy to oppose. Trump doesn’t feel like he’s dealing with reality unless he’s manipulating the truth to fool someone, and that’s precisely why – as he faces a crisis of the type that he’s never seen – he’s more furious than ever that the media won’t simply “listen to him” and report what he says.

He is panicking because he is totally out of his realm. In some ways, it is fitting. The only way Trump wins is if we all win, but Trump doesn’t see that as a real victory, and so he’ll likely lose. So will we, at least more so than we might have.

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Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom