The Trump administration stumbled out of the gate on testing, then found its footing. I detailed in this overly long piece how they, working closely with industry, ramped up testing. This makes it insane that Trump has doubled down on a joke from his Tulsa rally, where he said he told his people to slow down testing (because it uncovers more cases, which makes our numbers look worse). Having talked expansively to people in and out of government, there is no way this happened. We did hit a plateau in April for a while, but that had to do with supply-chain issues and limits to how fast labs and diagnostic manufacturers could scale up. Otherwise, we have been steadily increasing. A conventional president would simply boast about that. Instead, Trump is obscuring his own team’s impressive work because he’s embroiled in a nonsense controversy and he only knows how to double down.