“Don’t be afraid of Covid” was Donald Trump’s message on leaving hospital this week. To say he was tempting fate would be an understatement. The US president could not know where the disease would leave him. He ought to know that the only way he could win re-election is by focusing on anything but the pandemic. The polls are unequivocal on that: a clear majority of Americans do not trust what he says about the disease. That was true long before he fell sick and is likely to remain true on November 3.

It follows that Mr Trump must change the subject or take radical steps to make Americans trust his pandemic-management skills. He has instead chosen to do something solipsistic — tell Americans the pathogen can be defeated by sheer force of will. This is a rash mix. It is further depressing his poll ratings on coronavirus while making it harder for him to change the subject. The fact that Mr Trump is insisting on going ahead with next week’s presidential debate when he still may be infectious only reinforces that. 

It should be no surprise that Joe Biden’s poll leads over Mr Trump has hit double digits in Florida where a lot of retirees live, according to one recent poll. His averaged overall national lead is now near double digits. Even if those margins were halved, Mr Trump would be facing a heavy defeat. It will take more than heroic willpower to reverse that. No US presidential candidate has entered the last month of the election with a deficit that wide and gone on to win.

Remember that Trump views himself as a perpetual winner at life. He is incapable of admitting defeat or failure -- his multiple bankruptcies were all strategic successes, any deal that went south was because he decided it was a bad deal etc. -- and, therefore, when a loss looks likely Trump naturally looks for reason as to why he was somehow cheated, for example:

His fact-free assertion that 3 to 5 million people cast illegal votes in the 2016 election to explain why Hillary Clinton beat him by nearly 3 million in the popular vote. His blaming of Republicans who refused to run on his record (false!) for GOP losses in the midterms. His ongoing attempts to suggest that everyone involved with the FBI counterintelligence probe, which found that Russia sought to actively interfere in the 2016 election to help him and hurt Clinton, should be jailed. And of course, Trump's repeated -- and repeatedly false -- claims that the increase in mail-in-balloting in the 2020 election (due to concerns about Covid-19) will lead to a fraudulent election.

Trump's refusal to participate in a virtual second debate fits directly into that pattern of thinking: They changed the rules on me! Joe Biden couldn't survive another in-person debate with me! This is all rigged!

For the last four years, Trump’s supporters and detractors have retconned his 2016 victory, arguing that, having won an improbable election, the president must be a political genius. In this school of thought, Trump’s psychotic tweets and staggering incompetence are rendered into perverse strengths: We are playing checkers; he is playing chess. This narrative deserved to die an agonizing death years ago and should now be cast aside forever. Trailing in the polls with only 30 days left before the 2020 election, the president has embraced a reelection strategy that is, even for him, profoundly stupid.

When Trump was initially diagnosed with Covid-19, there was some speculation that this could actually be good for him. The president’s haphazard pandemic response has received abysmal marks: Here was an opportunity to change the narrative. There could, some added, be a “rally round the bedside” effect, similar to what happened following U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hospitalization for Covid-19 in the spring. “This moment is an opportunity for Trump to hit reset on his tone-deaf message on COVID that we are always on the cusp of seeing the definitive end of the virus,” wrote the editors of The National Review. “His lack of realism during the pandemic is one reason his ratings on handling it are so low.” Get the message right, this line of thinking goes, and Trump can save his campaign.

This argument assumed that Trump could adopt humility and use his physical weakness as a political strength—that he could even admit fault, recognizing his own failures and the importance of frontline workers and first responders. Voters didn’t think Trump was taking Covid-19 seriously; here was an opportunity to show them just how seriously he was taking the virus.