This makes it even worse

Bill Palmer | 2:23 pm EDT March 18, 2020

Palmer Report » Analysis

The first rule of Donald Trump is that he’s always wrong and he screws up everything. The second rule of Donald Trump is that he can never admit he’s wrong or that he’s screwed up anything. We’ve always seen this pattern on display. Now that he’s finally facing truly challenging circumstances for the first time in his cushy life, this pattern is magnified.

Donald Trump is finally admitting that the coronavirus is a crisis and a pandemic. That would be progress, if he had any clue what to do about it, which he obviously still doesn’t. But he also can’t admit he didn’t see it coming, which makes it even worse for him. It would be one thing for him to make excuses for why he didn’t act sooner. But he can’t admit he should have acted sooner, so he’s now claiming that he knew it was a pandemic all along.

Wait a minute here. If Trump knew all along that this was a serious crisis, why didn’t he do anything? In reality he’s the pilot who ignored the flashing warning light because he didn’t know what it meant anyway. Now he’s insisting that he knew what the warning light meant all along, which would mean that he knew the plane was going to crash and he still ignored it.

The thing about a severely psychologically compromised person like Donald Trump is that when he gets into trouble, his clinical compulsions only serve to make things even worse for him. Trump has now thrown away the naivete defense, and he’s moved on to asserting that he knew it was going to be this bad and he chose not to act. Whether that’s true or not, he’s staking himself to the ugliest explanation possible.