Olivia Nuzzi writes:

“At the best of times, Trumpworld operates with all the strategic direction of a chicken with its head cut off,” a senior Republican official told me. “Right now, they’re operating like a chicken with its head cut off, lit on fire, and thrown off a cliff.”

The world has heard little from Donald Trump since he announced, just before 1 a.m. on Friday, that he has been diagnosed with COVID-19. Usually it’s the tweets that cause concern, but today it’s been the lack of them.

According to a senior White House official, Trump has been “active” today and has spoken to members of Congress by phone, even as his doctors are “encouraging him to rest.” Famously, Trump does not enjoy physical movement, and the official told me that “active” in this case means he has been talking to members of his staff and members of Congress. “His symptoms are mild,” the official said. Late Friday afternoon, the president’s physician described him as “fatigued but in good spirits” after receiving “a single eight-gram dose of Regeneron’s polyclonal antibody cocktail. He completed the infusion without incident.” He added that the president was also taking “zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin, and daily aspirin.” This has been the story from the White House today: to downplay the president’s diagnosis just as he has downplayed the country’s diagnosis for the past nine months.

It goes without saying that this was avoidable. While it’s true that even the most cautious person could be unlucky and could contract the virus despite going to great lengths to avoid it, President Trump was, proudly, very much not that.

He has never taken this pandemic seriously, not even as his advisers warned him that he should, not even as bodies piled up in hospitals in his hometown, as the death ticker recorded hundreds and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands of dead Americans. [Continue reading…]