ORANGXINA:

After months of ignoring and downplaying the coronavirus crisis, Donald Trump addressed the nation on March 11 from the Oval Office. It was the first in what was to become a series of briefings. These all-consuming almost daily events have been marked by happy talk, exaggeration, misinformation, and outright lies by President Trump.

Trump's lies have ranged far and wide. In part, this pattern is based on his general ignorance and the lack of seriousness with which he approached the crisis during the only period America had to mitigate it.

Other lies are standard Trumpian hyperbole meeting a moment that calls for brutal truth-telling.

Still others are deliberate attempts to hide his failures or to make the American people believe something that is untrue in order to make himself look better.

Daniel Dale at CNN has done yeoman's work cataloguing the lies big and small. What this timeline provides is an overarching look at three weeks worth of public statements to give a sense of the breadth and scope of his mendacity over the course of the crisis and how it has irreparably undermined the public trust.

Every few days brings another grim milestone in the coronavirus outbreak. First Italy and Spain surpassed China in reported deaths. Then, this week, the U.S. and France did.

But did they really?

Skepticism about China's numbers has swirled throughout the crisis, fueled by official efforts to quash bad news in the early days and a general distrust of the government. Long lines of people waiting to collect the ashes of loved ones at funeral homes last week revived the debate.

There is no smoking gun pointing to a cover-up by China's ruling Communist Party. But intentional or not, there is reason to believe that more people died of COVID-19 than the official tally, which stood at 3,312 at the end of Tuesday. The same applies to the 81,554 confirmed cases, now exceeded by the U.S., Italy and Spain.

The health system in Wuhan, the city where three-fourths of China's victims died, was overwhelmed at the peak of the outbreak. Hospitals overflowed, patients with symptoms were sent home and there weren't enough kits to test everyone.

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