President Trump is as scared of running against Joe Biden as he is of running. The question is, why? One reason he fears Biden is because Biden is like him. He's old, gets confused, mispronounces words, forgets things, and makes gaffes. But attacking him for these things invites the obvious response: "He sounds a lot like you!"Indeed, Trump can't attack Biden without attacking himself. Biden's weaknesses magnify Trump's, which are far worse. There's nothing that Biden does that Trump doesn't do worse. Biden has been touchy with women; Trump has been criminal with women. Biden has hair plugs; Trump has something worse. Biden said Barack Obama was "articulate." Trump said Obama was Kenyan.Trump hasn't addressed any of these yet. Instead, he is focusing on Biden's mental acuity. "Sleepy Joe," Trump said last week, "he doesn't even know where he is or what he's doing or what office he's running for. Honestly, I don't think he knows what office he's running for."In typical narcissistic fashion, Trump is projecting his flaws onto his opponent. He did this in 2016 when he attacked Hillary Clinton for running a fraudulent charity and risking state secrets. When Clinton said Trump was Vladimir Putin's "puppet" in a debate, Trump shot back, "You're the puppet!" Which was unconvincing. By parroting Clinton's accusation, he effectively confirmed it. Trump's team learned a valuable lesson from that: Always accuse your opponent of that which you are guilty — and do it before he or she accuses you. With Biden, Trump is shouting "You're the puppet!" preemptively.Trump began the week by tweeting, "The Obama/Biden Administration is the most corrupt Administration in the history of our Country!" To paraphrase Dragnet, the names have been changed to protect the guilty.This is the downside to the preemptive strike: Every projection is a confession of guilt.The Republican Party is smearing Biden by likening him to Trump. Steve Guest, the RNC's rapid response director, tweeted: "Joe Biden confuses who his wife is and who his sister is during Super Tuesday speech." Unlike Trump, who confuses his daughter for his mistress.Donald Trump Jr. said that Biden's "family fortunes" were "totally tied to him being in elected office." The next day, he tweeted, "It's almost like the whole Biden family is entity [sic] dependent on Joe holding public office?" It's almost as if Donald Trump Jr. became a best-selling author because the RNC bought copies of his book in bulk during his father's presidency.On Tuesday, Eric Trump said, "If my father was making the same gaffes as he was, they would literally invoke Article 25 of the uh," by which he meant the U.S. Constitution.This is the document Trump swore to uphold and hasn't read. Among the parts he hasn't read, he hasn't read the impeachment clauses the most. At a rally in North Carolina this month, Trump said that Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Pete Buttigieg "should be impeached." Trump is the third president to be impeached and the first president who, after being impeached, doesn't know how impeachment works.Trump reveals his ignorance every time he speaks, which is too often. Last year, he said, "When I say something that you might think is a gaffe, it's on purpose. It's not a gaffe." Two days later, Trump said that one of America's "greatest strides" was the "abolition of civil rights." It's somehow just as unsettling for the president to declare his opposition to civil rights by accident as it is on purpose, and it's equally plausible.In an interview on Fox Business in 2017, Trump managed to recount the details of a cake he was eating while launching missiles, but not which country he was attacking. Trump, who claimed to have "one of the best memories in the world" and then forgot he said that, says Biden has a deficient memory.He does. On Tuesday, Biden, discussing guns, mistakenly said "AR-14" instead of "AR-15." This was the same day that Trump, asked about the coronavirus, said, "I've been briefed on every contingency you could possibly imagine. Many contingencies. A lot of positive. Different numbers. All different numbers. Very large numbers, and some small numbers too, by the way."This is how Trump speaks: He uses a lot of words to say nothing at all. His mouth is always open and his mind is always closed."Have you ever seen a national candidate or nominee stumble over so many words and putting sentences together?" Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked. "I think he's really struggling. I think Trump will make mincemeat of him in a debate."Paul has a point. It's hard to rebut Trump's statements. That's because it's hard to understand them.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com Trump reportedly rejected aggressive coronavirus testing in hopes it would help his re-election Trump reportedly set to declare coronavirus a national emergency The entire country of Norway is 'shutting down'

Sean Hannity used his syndicated talk-radio program Wednesday to share a prediction he had found on Twitter about what is really happening with the coronavirus: It's a "fraud" by the deep state to spread panic in the populace, manipulate the economy and suppress dissent."May be true," Hannity declared to millions of listeners around the country.As the coronavirus spreads around the globe, denial and disinformation about the risks are proliferating on media outlets popular with conservatives."This coronavirus?" Rush Limbaugh asked skeptically during his Wednesday program. "All of this panic is just not warranted."The Fox Business anchor Trish Regan told viewers Monday that the worry over coronavirus "is yet another attempt to impeach the president."Where doctors and scientists see a public health crisis, President Donald Trump and his media allies see a political coup afoot.Even on Wednesday night, after Trump gave an unusually somber address to the nation in which he announced he was suspending all travel from Europe for 30 days, Hannity criticized Democrats and vigorously defended the president's response to the crisis, saying that when he instituted travel restrictions on China more than a month ago, "no president had ever acted that fast."Distorted realities and discarded facts are now such a part of everyday life that the way they shape events like impeachment, a mass shooting or a presidential address often goes unmentioned.But when partisan news meets a pandemic, the information silos where people shelter themselves can become not just deluded but also dangerous, according to those who criticize conservative commentators for shedding any semblance of objectivity when it comes to covering the president."This sort of media spin poses a clear and present danger to public health," said Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative host and author who published a book, "How the Right Lost Its Mind," in 2018. "If you have people out there who feel all of this is overblown, and feel the need to act out their lack of concern by not taking precautions, it could be exceptionally dangerous."That's not just a problem for the right wing, that becomes a real threat to the general population," added Sykes, who is also a contributor to MSNBC. "When people start dying, the entertainment value wears off."In the case of Fox News viewers and talk radio listeners, who tend to be older than the general population, the danger of playing down the threat is potentially far worse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has specifically identified older people as being at higher risk from serious complications if they contract the virus. Nielsen, the TV ratings agency, lists the average age of a Fox News viewer as 65 years old.Despite Hannity's own skeptical commentary, his Tuesday show featured Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a guest. He told Hannity that he wanted to "make sure" viewers knew that the coronavirus "is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu -- you got to make sure that people understand that."It was not difficult to see why Fauci would think Hannity's roughly 4 million viewers -- the biggest audience in cable news -- might not understand. On Tuesday, the star anchor told his viewers, effectively, to relax."Sadly, these viruses pop up time to time," Hannity said, with the certitude of a medical professional. "Pandemics happen, time to time."Limbaugh has offered clinical advice of his own. Recently he defended his widely criticized comparison of the coronavirus to the common cold and suggested the timing of the coverage of the outbreak raised "a gigantic series of question marks and red flags."And not all the prominent players in conservative opinion are denying the seriousness of the threat. Disagreement on the right has spilled into public view in a way that is unusual, given how swiftly dissent is often punished by Trump and his media loyalists."It's a matter of public health. How can these shills face their followers after all the lies and deceit?" asked Michael Savage, the radio host and author who was one of Trump's earliest supporters in conservative media and urged him to run for president in 2011."Are these mouthpieces without any social conscience?" added Savage, who called the words of Limbaugh and others "criminal negligence."Speaking on his Monday Fox News show, Tucker Carlson seemed to speak directly to skeptics like the president and Hannity, whose prime-time program follows his. "People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem," Carlson said, adding: "People you know will get sick, some may die. This is real."Trump pays close attention to Carlson's show, and the two are in regular contact by phone. Earlier this year, the anchor was credited with helping persuade the president to dial back his hawkish approach on Iran -- and Carlson's words on the virus this week were interpreted as a message aimed at the White House.There are also signs that political views affect how seriously someone takes the public health risk posed by the virus.A Reuters poll last week found that roughly 4 in 10 Democrats believed the coronavirus was an imminent threat -- but only 2 in 10 Republicans felt the same way. And Americans who approve of the way the president is handling his job are far more likely to believe that the government can stop a nationwide epidemic from occurring than those who disapprove, the poll said.Seventy-nine percent of those who gave Trump high job approval ratings said they were very or somewhat confident in the government's ability to prevent the outbreak from becoming much worse, compared with only 39% of those who disapprove of him, according to a CNN poll conducted last week.At times, there has been a jarring split screen between the president's nonchalance and the sober warnings of the nation's top health officials, who have been more aggressive about warning certain vulnerable populations not to travel.Asked Wednesday at the White House what he had to say to those concerned he is not taking the situation seriously enough, Trump offered a tart, terse reply: "Fake news," the president snapped, before dismissing reporters from the room.The fallout from the president's handling of the crisis might have been more easily dismissed as liberal, anti-Trump paranoia if not for an improbable twist of events. A person infected with the coronavirus attended one of the conservative world's biggest annual gatherings last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, leading some politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to voluntarily quarantine themselves.Before this person's status was made public -- he was a VIP attendee who purchased a $5,750 "gold" package that granted him access to backstage reception rooms where members of Congress and other high-profile figures mingled -- conservatives at the conference were accusing the president's enemies of inflating the seriousness of the outbreak.The former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, speaking from the conference stage last Friday, insisted falsely that the media had only just started paying attention to the coronavirus after the impeachment trial ended. And the reason, he added, was "they think this is going to be what brings down the president."But over the next few days, CPAC's organizers were pelted with questions from fellow conservatives, some of whom said they shook the infected guest's hand, about why they had been left in the dark.Suddenly the "hoax," as Hannity and others have called the response to the virus, hit home.Raheem Kassam, a former Breitbart News editor, was one of several conservative activists who attended CPAC and expressed frustration about how the group handled the incident. Kassam, who said he felt sick over the weekend and on social media chronicled his frustrated attempts to obtain a coronavirus test, knew that he might have been exposed only after someone who works in the office of a member of Congress who was also exposed contacted him."I think there's a grown-up conversation to be had about what happened," Kassam said in an interview, adding that he did not believe that some conservatives wanted to have that conversation now. "Imagine being that sick, and then finding out why I might be that sick in a thirdhand way. I was angry. I was frustrated. I was scared," he added.But the president's allies have attacked Kassam, accusing him of sowing panic when there are no other known cases to come out of the conference.Matt Schlapp, president of CPAC, who has sequestered himself at home because he also shook the infected attendee's hand, appeared on Fox News in recent days to malign the media for exaggerating the threat.And though he acknowledged in a subsequent interview that he had no medical training, he has made claims about the coronavirus and its apparent lack of contagiousness."It's actually hard to get," he said on Fox News on Wednesday, speaking via Skype from his home, where he still has a few days left in his self-imposed quarantine.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was preparing to hop in a caravan of SUVs to depart the Capitol Tuesday afternoon when he called Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Mnuchin had just spent an hour huddling with Senate Republicans as President Donald Trump tried to sell wary GOP lawmakers on his plan to prevent an economic collapse from the coronavirus pandemic. Pelosi, who was having a hard time hearing Mnuchin due to poor cell phone reception, asked if he just wanted to come to her office across the Capitol instead.

Just hours before, Trump had taken his latest shot at Pelosi in a morning tweet. But that didn’t deter the speaker, who huddled with Mnuchin for a 30-minute meeting in her office. The two also chatted on the phone twice on Wednesday, and Pelosi is now on the verge of pushing through a massive stimulus bill that could earn GOP support, as well as Trump’s signature.

For any other leader, the rapid turnaround on the recovery plan would be a herculean feat at best. But for Pelosi, successfully negotiating a multi-billion-dollar economic package with a hostile and often antagonistic Trump administration was just another day in the speaker’s suite.

It’s also a reminder that for all Trump’s omnipresence on Twitter and cable TV, Pelosi remains the dominant figure on Capitol Hill when it comes time to actually getting something accomplished.

“She understands what has to be done, and will do so in a very limited time frame and scope while trying to be inclusive with a very diverse caucus that also has a lot of their own ideas on how to solve the problem,” said Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.). “While there can be some consternation going forward, at the end of the day, she has the trust of the caucus.”

“It feels like we have someone who is competent, who is gathering folks around to come up with clear thoughts on how to move forward in a time of crisis,” added Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.).

Yet the coronavirus crisis is unlike anything Washington has faced in a century — a pandemic with no cure that has sent financial markets into a tailspin and is rapidly spreading throughout the country, sickening more than 1,000 Americans and killing 32 in the U.S. so far.

The face of the U.S. response — of course — is Trump. And he announced plans for some executive action to help the public in a Wednesday night address, including on paid sick leave. But he’s also taken a sometimes-erratic approach to the outbreak, often undermining his own administration’s recommendations and repeating falsehoods about the coronavirus being “very much under control” in the country.

Pelosi and other Democrats helped push through $8.3 billion in emergency funding last week — more than triple what the White House originally sought — and are likely to pass stimulus legislation later Thursday. The episode plays to her strengths as the longtime Democratic leader: Figure out your goals, move quickly, and build your support on the fly, while always keeping your eye on the magic 218-vote number.

The sheer variety of national emergencies Pelosi has faced during her 17 years as House Democratic leader is stunning, and represents the turbulent nature of 21st century American life — Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, the federal government shutdowns of 2013 and 2018-19, and Trump's recent impeachment, are among the highlights.

Pelosi herself ticked off many of those crises when talking to reporters on Tuesday, saying that is what helps guide her and her leadership team, even in this time of great uncertainty: “We have experience with this,” Pelosi said.

“I’ve gone through a number of these crises with her as the leader and she is unflappable,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “The last thing we need is some kind of a hot-headed leader trying to figure out what we can do to hurt the other side,” he added. “She don’t play that game.”

Even before Mnuchin called her Tuesday, Pelosi was already moving forward with legislation to ensure Americans have access to paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, food and free coronavirus testing if they’re impacted by the pandemic. And she made clear that her House would move ahead with the bill even if there wasn’t buy-in from the administration.

Pelosi also has enormous political leverage during this episode. By moving quickly, Pelosi has put pressure on the White House and GOP leaders to respond. She could put a bill on the floor and see if Republicans would vote against it, something top Democrats believe will never happen.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), a key Trump ally, said Tuesday his conference could end up backing the Democratic bill. McCarthy has also been talking with Mnuchin about the plan Democrats drafted.

“I think we need to do something,” McCarthy said in an interview. “I think the [proposals] that will be put forth are not very controversial and could be bipartisan… This is short-term spending, but this is needed.”

Pelosi’s relationship with Mnuchin has proved a critical lifeline to the White House, allowing the two to continue to negotiate even as Trump tweeted broadsides at Democrats Wednesday afternoon. Pelosi also shared bill language with Mnuchin before unveiling it to the public.

Mnuchin and Pelosi have gained a professional respect for each other that developed as the pair worked to clinch a massive budget deal last summer. The speaker essentially locked out Trump’s other appointed negotiators, including then-acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, saying he had “no credibility” on the issue, and worked solely with Mnuchin to get the deal done.

The speaker has also slightly changed her posture toward her own caucus as the crisis worsens, according to several Democrats present for leadership and caucus meetings.

Democrats said Pelosi has been very direct in private meetings, immediately shutting down ideas she doesn’t think are viable, including suggestions that lawmakers be allowed to vote remotely or an idea raised Wednesday to mail Americans a check instead of temporarily expanding some federal safety nets.

Pelosi has also worked closely with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — as she did with his predecessor, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada — on this effort. The two Democratic leaders have insisted that any federal response be targeted at those most directly impacted by the crisis, not used as a grab bag to advance other political agendas, such as corporate tax cuts. Pelosi and Schumer have dismissed a Trump-backed proposal to cut the federal payroll tax, instead pushing paid sick leave and other efforts to strengthen the social safety net.

Pelosi’s allies say time is of the essence — the crisis continues to evolve as the virus spreads across the country. And the response needed from Washington could change from one day to the next. In short, there isn’t time for dilly dallying.

“She is the captain of the ship and she is leading it,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.). Dingell was referencing Pelosi, who on Tuesday tried to calm anxious Democrats by telling them they are the “captains of the ship” and “the last to leave.”

Pelosi has also resisted calls from some members — a minority at this point, but it’s growing — to close the Capitol. While public tours will be prohibited for the rest of March, Pelosi and other party leaders have argued that Congress should be open as long as the federal government is open.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), a close ally, said she agreed with Pelosi’s call.

“I can’t help but think of Lincoln during the Civil War,” Eshoo said. “The workmen reported to the president that the [iron] that was being used to build the Capitol was needed for armaments. He said, ‘We are not going to stop building the Capitol. That is a demonstration of the confidence we have.’ I think that’s an expression of her confidence.”

It’s sobriety time for Trump partisans who were feeling wildly upbeat in the wake of the self-destructive Democratic failure with impeachment and from polls showing most Americans expected the president to win a second term. The primary results Tuesday night in Michigan should be setting off alarm bells in Trump Land. They are so suggestive...

Sen. Mitt Romney's tearful decision to vote in favor of an article of impeachment against President Trump last month prompted the president to declare the Utah Republican a "disgrace" to the GOP.

Democrats, however, appear to be charmed.

"Although Romney's 39% favorability among U.S. adults is unchanged from a year ...