The Trump presidency has presented scores of painful lessons on the limitations of the power of positive thinking. Climate change continues to make fires, floods and hurricanes worse, even if Trump denies it and his political appointees seek to erase mentions of it from government reports. Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the intelligence community agrees the Kremlin is trying once again to influence the 2020 campaign, but Trump struggles to accept that reality because, current and former aides say, he believes that acknowledging the Kremlin’s support for his campaign would undermine his legitimacy. And so on.

But nothing captures the hubris of trying to spin the primal forces of nature into submission more than the president’s response to the novel coronavirus.

Trump said in January that the coronavirus was “totally under control” and that there would be only a few U.S. cases before the number would “go down