For Trump, America's craving for hope as deaths proliferate bespeaks, instead, its mass adoration for an incurable narcissist who proposes to affix his own signature to the stimulus checks so many desperately need.

So swiftly does his daily deluge of falsehoods, contradictions, and self-exculpation swell that the New York Times sorts them into categories: "Playing down the severity of the pandemic"; "Overstating potential treatments and policies"; "Blaming others"; and "Rewriting history."

Reality vanishes. When a Democratic Super-PAC ran a videotape of Trump's most egregious misstatements, his campaign threatened to sue.

One pronouncement consumes the next: Democrats are overhyping the danger because "this is their new hoax." He may quarantine New York and Connecticut. If you want a test, you can get a test. COVID-19 is just like the "flu."

And all of this as we pay in fatalities for his original sins: ignoring warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies about the outbreak, and failing to prepare the tests and stockpiles needed to combat the virus.

Yet he learns so little. Until Sunday, he meant to celebrate Easter by relaxing social distancing - which, public health experts estimated, would cost between 1.6 and 2.2 million lives. That any imbecile would have known better only intensified the relief when, at last, Trump heeded Drs. Fauci and Birx - and the warnings of campaign advisors that the dead would doom his re-election. By this point, Dr. Birx explained, if Americans at large observe social distancing "perfectly," we may confine our fatalities somewhat in the range of an appalling 100,000 to 200,000 lives.

Another president would have taken his own harrowing history of sustained and fatal misjudgements as a mandate for self-reflection. Trump called into Fox & Friends to congratulate himself...