And Bozo is doing what they told him to do.

Trump just reiterated his lack of worry about the spread of the novel illness in the US. Perhaps problematic, though is that, to many, he’s coming across as casually dismissive and posturing, not measured, and reassuringly presidential.

“You have to be calm,” he said, at the White House this morning before departing to tour the tornado damage in Tennessee and just after signing an $8.3 billion emergency spending bill to deal with the virus.

And the best way to be calm is to have the government hide the truth from you. Better calm and dead than agitated and alive, right?

“It will go away,” he said. “We have very low numbers [of confirmed cases] compared to many countries throughout the world, our numbers are lower than almost anyone…deaths, is it 11?” It is.

It was. Now it’s 14. Also…we have low numbers now, because contagion doesn’t go from zero to a billion in one day. Other countries have more because that’s where it started, not because The God of Epidemics and Stock Markets made it so.

“This came unexpectedly, it came out of China, we closed it down, we stopped it, it was a very early shut down,” he added.

Sure, just wave your tiny hands and say we shut it down, that’s all it takes.