Nothing screams "reassuring" during a growing pandemic quite as much as seeing one's president unable to read a short speech written in large letters in his native language after he spent weeks deriding mounting evidence of the pandemic as "fake news." That was America's experience last week as it watched President Donald Trump struggle to get through the blather-heavy remarks hastily cobbled together for him to deliver to an increasingly anxious nation. It was, tweeted MSNBC's Chris Hayes in real time, "like he's reading a foreign language phonetically."

Trump's stab at looking presidential was as devoid of credibility as any performance he has ever given, and that is saying something. No one watching it, save the most hopelessly gullible, could have believed the president had the vaguest idea what he was doing. It was enough to trigger the only wave of nostalgia for former President Herbert Hoover on record, and it was no wonder that within minutes, stock markets tanked and American civil society began announcing that it was shutting down.

It didn't take a Ph.D. in public relations to recognize that Trump's address was the Hindenburg disaster of spin control. His team quickly attempted a do-over, arranging a Rose Garden press conference for him. There the president was joined by a gaggle of CEOs, none of whom appeared to know what he was doing there, each of them tasked with affirming their general willingness to help their country with statements 30 seconds or less.

But it was not much of an improvement over the Oval Office address. For weeks Trump had been dismissing the very idea that the novel coronavirus is worth worrying about, let alone preparing for. "We have it totally under control," he told an interviewer on Jan. 22. "It's one person coming in from China. It's going to be just fine." On Feb. 2 he trotted out the same snake oil. "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China," the president said. During February and into March, he was accusing Democrats calling for action to combat the virus of promoting "fake news," once again accusing those who saw reality differently of promoting a "hoax."

Asked in the Rose Garden by PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor about his 2018 dismantling of the White House unit tasked with addressing global health crises, and whether he was prepared to take any responsibility for his administration's failure to prepare for the pandemic, the president displayed that stand-up guy quality for which he is famous. "I think it's a nasty question," he snapped. "When you say me, I didn't do it. We have a group of people in this administration." Pressed by NBC's Kristen Welker whether he accepts any responsibility for our ill-preparedness, The Prince of Bone Spurs was true to character. "I don't take responsibility at all," he said, ever the role model. Then there was the White House's strange rollout of a poster board with a graphic touting a website that Americans could supposedly access for coronavirus testing, developed by Google and ready for use "very quickly." This was news to Google, which quickly corrected him. Turns out its subsidiary has merely agreed to try to develop a pilot website, which is not ready and won't be ready anytime soon.

It was Vice President Mike Pence, head of the president's coronavirus task force, who inadvertently captured the alternate universe in which Trump World resides. "This day should be an inspiration to every American," he proclaimed at the press conference with a perfectly straight face. It was a reminder that something was seriously unhealthy in America even before the coronavirus hit, and will remain amiss even after the virus is defeated.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.