Why won’t he recognize that unless he deals with the pandemic, none of his other goals, including re-election, can be realized? Because he’s Donald Trump:
People close to Trump, many speaking anonymously to share candid discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.
This is the story of his presidency. In fact, his unwillingness to admit he’s wrong and magical thinking cause him to rebel against the obvious path to fix any of his problems. For instance, he was duped and helped by the Russian government in 2016 and instead of reacting as another president might have done, by at least acting as if he’s angry at Vladimir Putin for interfering, he embraced him publicly in shocking ways as an immature act of defiance. He made it immeasurably worse for himself by behaving this way.
So his refusal to admit he was wrong about the pandemic has led him to consciously make it spread with the demands for prematurely re-opening businesses, refusal to wear a mask, threatening schools with reprisals if they don’t completely re-open, demeaning testing as unnecessary — all of it.
He is a defiant 74 year old toddler.
It wasn’t hard to see that he was psychologically unfit for the presidency in 2016. (He talked about his penis size in a national debate). His character, as exemplified by the lawsuits, the assaults on women, the treatment of his own children and relatives was also there to see. Of course he would be unable to do his job in a time of crisis.