What an ex-White House staffer and a concerned psychiatrist told me about Trump's reaction to the coronavirus crisis

'If you take the exact opposite of what he's saying, then you get the truth'

As anyone who pays much attention to the workings of his administration can tell you, Donald Trump is famously distractible. The list of anecdotes about his lack of attention to details that go beyond the cosmetic that have emerged over the course of his first three years in office is all but endless.

Of course, one doesn't have to be a voracious consumer of news to know that the 45th President of the United States has little to no ability to remain focused in a crisis.

Such insights can easily be divined by anyone who, over the last few days, has had a few minutes of time, a smartphone, and a Twitter account.

While most of Monday's news was devoted to the burgeoning coronavirus outbreak spreading across the country and US stock markets' largest single-day decline in value since the 2008 financial crisis, Americans who checked in to the president's online stream of consciousness that morning were treated to a host of opinions and pronouncements on any number of topics.

What specifically, you might ask, were the subjects on which the commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful military chose to weigh in?

After beginning his day by accusing Democrats and the press of trying to "inflame the coronavirus situation," the president turned his attention to comments Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made about two Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices. He promoted a baseless conspiracy theory about the Democratic presidential primary meant to inflame supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. And he republished a video of the US Surgeon General (an actual doctor in his mid-40s) telling CNN's Jake Tapper, somewhat bizarrely, that Trump "sleeps less than I do and he's healthier than what I am."

Trump also promoted another conspiracy theory positing that Democrats are "trying to smear" Sanders "with Russia, Russia, Russia" (because of a New York Times story about Sanders’ attempts to find a Soviet sister city for Burlington, Vermont during his mayoralty there), and claimed without evidence that the Obama-Biden administration was "the most corrupt… in the history of our country."

All that was before 9am.

Dr Bandy Lee, a Yale University medical school professor, psychiatrist, and public health expert who previously warned that Trump would not be able to handle the stress of a true emergency, said that Trump's "ability to continue to live in his alternative reality and resist the need to conform to the world is creating a crisis for him."

Every false statement, projection, or attempt to change the subject which Trump utters, Lee said, "directly translates into vast number of deaths right now" because "he's trying to put out a narrative that is the exact opposite of what should be happening."

"This kind of epidemic requires forethought and prevention, and he's trying to block information from getting to people, and he's making light of the situation in a way that vast amounts of his followers will take to heart and engage in exactly the wrong behavior," she continued, adding that the US is "headed straight toward a worst-case scenario”.

While some of the president's supporters have suggested that Trump is simply trying to project confidence and prevent panic in the face of a growing number of coronavirus cases within the United States, Lee said such attempts — including the rambling, self-congratulatory media availability Trump conducted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday — are evidence that he knows he is utterly unfit to lead the country through this crisis.

"He is noticing that the public health officials are getting attention and he wishes to be a part of it, but he is also feeling very bad about himself right now," she said. "His way of countering that is to repeatedly say how he how good he is at things and that he is an expert — even in this area — and that people should be looking to him. So he's trying to prop himself up and feel better."

The crisis presented by a viral pandemic — an opponent with which Trump's usual strategies of bluster and distraction carries no weight — is a perfect storm for someone with his insecurities, Lee added.

"He understands that he's totally ill-equipped to handle any situation, deep down, and the problem is that consciously he's pushing all of [these feelings] down. That's one of the reasons why he's projecting the opposite — he projects grandiosity, that only he can fix things and he's an expert in everything… because of this terrifying feeling of total inner inadequacy and worthlessness," she said. "He is going to create the biggest crisis situation because of the power and influence he has because he's gutted all the important agencies of their ability to confront this."

As a result, Lee warned that Americans should probably do the opposite of whatever the president advises because his own demons drive him to say and do the opposite of what needs to be said and done: ”The psychopathology behind that is rather complex, but because of the severity of the symptoms and his type of symptoms, if you take the exact opposite of what he is saying, you will get the truth."

But it's not just Trump himself who is distracted at a moment of crisis.

At roughly the same time that precipitous opening prices in US stock markets triggered "circuit breaker" rules to temporarily halt trading, two of the Trump administration officials charged with halting the spread of coronavirus in the US were engaged in a completely unrelated matter.

The heads of two sprawling bureaucracies charged with finding solutions to this crisis, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma, were bent over a speakerphone to brief reporters on — wait for it — new regulations on Electronic Health Record interoperability.

The regulations, which begin to go into effect roughly two years from now, implemented provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act, which then-President Barack Obama signed into law in December 2016. Still, Azar took time on the call to praise Trump credit for "a bold, new way of thinking about government in healthcare."

When it came time to ask questions, I asked Azar and Verma how Americans could have any confidence that the Trump administration was focused on the outbreak when the president was spending the morning thumbing tweets into his phone and two of his coronavirus task force members were devoting part of their morning to a seemingly superfluous press briefing.

But the junior White House press office staffer who was running the call didn't allow either official to answer the question.

Instead, the official dismissively replied: "Thank you for your commentary and question. This is a call about interoperability, and we’re happy to take any more questions we have about interoperability this morning. Next caller."

While an administration source said that the briefing call had been on Azar's and Verma's calendars for months, Chris Lu, who managed Obama's cabinet from 2009 to 2013, said the fact that the White House allowed them to appear in a briefing that wasn't about coronavirus shows the Trump administration isn't focusing its efforts on getting Americans the information they need to protect themselves.

"Somebody at the White House should have thought to themselves: 'This is a little bit off-message from what we're trying to do today,' and said, 'You know what? This could either be done through a press release or pushed off to another day,'" said Lu, who is now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

"Even if you're trying to tout good news, that's not the way to do it. All it does is show that you're not 110 per cent focused on the news of the day," he continued. "That's the reason why you wouldn't do this announcement, or if you're going to do it, then you do it by press release."

Lu suggested that the only reason officials like Azar and Verma would be on such a call during a crisis — as opposed to lower-level officials — would be as an attempt to distract attention from the news of the day.

"If the Trump folks thought this would distract reporters from the news, then they really haven't learned much.”