A 4.11 N.Y. Times story, reported by Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes, said that between late January and mid-March, President Trump lied, denied, side-stepped and fiddled while the pandemic spread and spread. Today he was asked about this — pure comedy.

From Andy Kroll‘s 4.15 Rolling Stone article, “‘Absolute Clusterfuck’: Inside the Denial and Dysfunction of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force & how the White House fumbled its response to the worst pandemic in a century”:

“If you were to write a playbook for how not to prevent a public-health crisis, you would study the work of the Trump administration in the first three months of 2020.

“The Trump White House, through some combination of ignorance, arrogance and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts. It failed to listen to the projections of one of its own economic advisers. It failed to take seriously what has become the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And when the White House finally awoke to the seriousness of COVID-19, the response it mustered managed to contain all the worst traits of this presidency. Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies.”

April 13, 2020by Jeffrey WellsNo Comments