So bad that Trump sued in effort to silence the truth.

Trump's last year in office was largely defined by his response to the novel virus, which has taken the lives of over 1.1 million Americans. The former president has repeatedly been criticized for his response to COVID-19 during the early months of the outbreak, including downplaying the risk of the virus and repeatedly contradicting public health officials.

In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, more than 450,000 Americans died from COVID-19, and life expectancy fell by 1.13 years, the biggest decrease since World War II. Many of the deaths were avoidable; COVID-19 mortality in the U.S. was 40 percent higher than the average of the other wealthy nations in the Group of Seven (G7).

In a Lancet report by the Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era, released on February 20, we chronicled Trump's effects on population health. His incompetent and malevolent response to the COVID-19 pandemic capped a presidency suffused with health-harming policies and actions.

Faced with the pandemic, Trump suppressed scientific data, delayed testing, mocked and blocked mask-wearing, and convened mass gatherings where social distancing was impossible. Despite the mounting threats of COVID-19 and global warming, he pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord. He installed industry insiders in regulatory posts tasked with protecting Americans from environmental and occupational hazards; their regulatory rollbacks resulted in 22,000 excess deaths from such hazards in 2019 alone. He pushed through a $1.9 trillion tax cut for the wealthy, creating a budget hole that he then used to justify cutting food and housing assistance for the needy. He tried, but failed, to repeal the ACA, then bent every effort to undermine it, pushing up the number of uninsured Americans by 2.3 million.

Although Trump bears special blame for America’s health woes, many of his policies did not represent a radical break with the past.

Nixon’s racially targeted war on drugs initiated mass incarceration, compromising the health of prisoners, their families and others in their communities. Starting in the Reagan era, financial deregulation, trade deals favoring corporations and attacks on union labor caused de-industrialization and increased income precarity in many parts of the country, contributing to an epidemic of “deaths of despair.” Market-based health care reforms dating to Reagan, and endorsed by Democrats and Republicans alike, have commercialized and bureaucratized medical care, raising costs and shifting care toward the wealthy. And corporate lobbyists have blocked regulation of dangerous products like firearms, obesogenic foods and addictive medications.

Trump’s Policy Failures Went Far Beyond All Those

Bob Woodward proposed that Trump tell people that the U.S. government was in "full mobilization" to stop the spread of COVID, which at the time of the conversation had killed over 10,000 Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"No matter what I do, they'll always tell you bad," Trump responded to Woodward's plan.

"OK, but you know what?" Woodward pressed. "I think people want—even the people who don't like you, people who oppose you—want this country to succeed on this."

"Well, no, I think there are some people that would rather have it not succeed," Trump said.

"There I disagree with you," the former president continued. "There are some people that would rather have it not succeed so that they could possibly beat me in the election, all right?"

"They're significant, and they're lying, and they control some of the media," Trump added. "Not all of it. I'm doing fine in much of the media. But there's a lot of really fake news out there, Bob."

In another portion of the interviews, the former president was pressed by Woodward for blaming the COVID-19 pandemic on ruining his reelection campaign in 2020, when Trump lost to President Joe Biden.

"If we didn't have the virus, I was 10, 12 points up," Trump told Woodward during a conversation on July 21, 2020. "I was cruising to election."

"Well, people are worried about the virus," Woodward responded.

"I know that, Bob, but the virus has nothing to do with me," Trump snaps back.

“Was there a moment in all of this, last two months, where you said to yourself – you know, you’re waking up or whatever you’re doing and you say, ‘Ah, this is the leadership test of a lifetime?’ ” Woodward asked Trump on March 19, in a new clip aired on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” on Tuesday night.

“No,” Trump replied

Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist. This judgment has been made by psychiatrists and prosecutors alike.

The milder form of the narcissistic personality disorder centers on grandiosity, delusional sense of self-importance and exploitative behavior.

The worst of the worst is the "malignant narcissist." All narcissists lack empathy, but malignant ones have little conscience. They find pleasure in inflicting pain. They commit crimes, pile lies upon lies and thrill at forcing others into submission — witness the serial humiliations of Sen. Lindsey Graham and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And they play the martyr, claiming to be the victims of the very frauds they play on others.

The psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term "malignant narcissist" in 1964. It's destructiveness, he said, made it "the quintessence of evil."

Trump probably knows he's not widely considered of sound mind. Why else would he feel the need to announce that he's a "very stable genius"?

But now as he enters a federal courthouse, two things need to be kept in mind. One is that malignant narcissists can seem charming and charismatic. (That's how they recruit victims to exploit later.) The other, however, is that there are effective ways to neutralize their ability to make threats and run smear campaigns. Courtrooms are the perfect place to practice them.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, now as in earlier prosecutions, has shown he knows their ways. And that is to ignore the baiting, even intimidation via calls to violence by pathetic thugs who might do what they think they're told.

Smith knows how to deal with malignant personalities. In 2021, he led the prosecution against Hashim Thaci, president of Kosovo, for war crimes. Smith stated that there was no justification for brutalizing Kosovar Albanians and showed he understood how authoritarians manipulate the media.

Meanwhile, a federal courthouse is not the narcissist's playground. Trump will not control the rules, and there are graduated punishments Judge Tanya Chutkan can impose if he pushes the limits. She can impose a gag order. She can hold him in civil contempt or seek criminal contempt.

Most important, though, the prosecutor will be Smith, a man who is expert both at criminal law and psychology. He will not be baited, much less intimidated. Smith is the narcissist defendant's nightmare.