Remember this? This was the lie of the last Republican administration.

Donald Trump is terrible, but even he has to put some effort into catching up with George W. Bush’s all-time whopper, a lie told to America to justify invading a country that did us no harm and that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

But the current president is trying, hard.

The White House is said to be moving to dismantle its Coronavirus Task Force even as other parts of the administration, according to the Times, anticipate as many as 3,000 pandemic-related deaths every day by June. The moral here seems clear: Trump’s work is done. All we can expect from him now is crowing about “Mission Accomplished.”

I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow, but in the meanwhile, this is the kind of thing you can expect from the Editorial Board. It’s politics in plain English for normal people and the common good. But I can’t do this work without your help right now. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber, right now, or leaving a generous tip!

THANK YOU! —John Stoehr