I’m not a fan of NYT but this is hilarious
The daily White House coronavirus task force briefing is the one portion of the day that Mr. Trump looks forward to, although even Republicans say that the two hours of political attacks, grievances and falsehoods by the president are hurting him politically.
Mr. Trump will hear none of it. Aides say he views them as prime-time shows that are the best substitute for the rallies he can no longer attend but craves.
Mr. Trump rarely attends the task force meetings that precede the briefings, and he typically does not prepare before he steps in front of the cameras. He is often seeing the final version of the day’s main talking points that aides have prepared for him for the first time although aides said he makes tweaks with a Sharpie just before he reads them live. He hastily plows through them, usually in a monotone, in order to get to the question-and-answer bullying session with reporters that he relishes.
It kind of reflects that, for most people, being President can be a pretty sh*%#y job. Trump has too much of the job that he hates, so he needs this outlet to have fun and make his life and his role worthwhile to him.

this Onion tweet is from a month ago. They predicted it so fucking well.
That's pretty amazing. Simpsons-like.
What trump said it’s accurate. Corona will die from it, so the person from detergent

.
Suicide is a great deterrent from getting COVID-19.
The government's incompetence aside, what's unique about the US is the obsession with conspiracy theories, dismissing things as hoaxes and lies, the fear that there is someone out there who is trying to milk people and fool them and steal their money all the time (think vaccination, climate change, a virus that is first discounted as something created by the media and then in a Chinese lab). There is of course always merit in discussing policies, there is no doubt that decisions with the best intentions could have detrimental effects, it's right to say that the claims made by policymakers are often not falsifiable (even if they end up being successful in producing the intended effect), but this much of disregard for scientific evidence (coupled with the know-it-all attitude no matter what the subject matter is, from economy to medicine), while might not be unique to the US, is the most vocal and the most dangerous in this country because of a giant lie machine in Fox News.
I do think Fox News is more of the symptom than the cause, Hoori. And sad to say, I think the Fox News effect has helped turn CNN into a shill and a shell of what it once was. When it comes to selling things to people, it pays better to pander than to challenge, and many of the media networks have caught on to that.
Of course Russia is no stranger to disinformation, but I get the sense that -- unlike a lot of Americans -- they know that all information is potentially rigged by design. With a lot of Americans it seems highly selective and definitely much aligned around supporting world views and the mental health (or illness) surrounding group identity, so skepticism gets a pass when it meets certain filtering criteria.
I used to think that a lot of those conspiracy theory biases were rooted in simpleton minds. And conspiracy theories on the surface work because some people are psychologically much more comfortable with a world that is characterized by design and human intention -- and that the opposite of randomness and complexity or chaos is too unsettling to not just comprehend but also mentally accept.
So unnerving it is to believe that JFK could be taken down by a lone, deranged gunman that there has to be a more plausible explanation. Rape victims cannot be random victims of violent crimes -- there has to be something they wore or did, the victim blaming, to cause it to happen. This provides a sort of false mental comfort that the world isn't random and that if you don't do A, B. or C, you can avoid ever falling victim yourself.
But I've come to believe it's more than just a simpleton's desire for a simple cause-and-effect universe. Part of the more uniquely American part is rooted in exceptionalism -- the idea that individuals know better than what the best of trained experts can tell us. So we get anti-vaxxers. We get people who claim GMOs are biological voodoo. We get people who play armchair epidemiologists, dismissing public health recommendations in favor of cult ideas of what's best for them and their families because they know better.
Our world of experts haven't done themselves a great service either by occasionally showing their biases. But we are all human and capable of mistakes not to mention finding data to fit our beliefs. Sadly the natural imperfection of humans causes some to believe that they individually know better than the collective experts who can self-censure the bad ideas from the good ones.
Statistically, that's true. People who live to age 70 have a longer expected lifespan, in total, than people who only made it to 50 yet, for example. This is the Bayesian inference part of life expectancy: the longer you survive, the more likely that you will have a longer than average lifespan.