Yamiche Alcindor, a reporter from PBS NewsHour, had an interesting exchange with Donald Trump the other day. But to put it in the proper context, we first need to roll back the clock to May 10, 2018.

On that day, The Washington Post ran a story that received relatively little public attention. Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, the government’s top global health security official, had suddenly quit his job. The Trump regime forced him out, and disbanded his entire team of pandemic-preparedness experts.

Key passages from the story:

(Ziemer’s) abrupt departure means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already under-prepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic…

His exit comes against the backdrop of other administration actions critics say have weakened health security preparedness, including dwindling financing for early preventative action against infectious diseases abroad…

The day before news of Ziemer’s exit became public, one of the officials on his team, Luciana Borio, director medical and biodefense preparedness, spoke at a symposium at Emery University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

“The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern,” she told the audience. “Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.”

OK. Back to our current dystopia.

On Friday, at the White House, Trump was asked about his regime’s disastrously slow rollout of coronavirus test kits. He was specifically asked whether he, as president, shouldered any blame. His predictable response: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

That attitude (the reverse of Harry Truman’s desk motto, “The Buck Stops Here”), teed up Yamiche Alcindor’s question: “You said that you don’t take responsibility, but you did disband the White House pandemic office, and the officials that were working in that office left this administration abruptly. So what responsibility do you take to that? And the officials that worked in that office said that the White House lost valuable time because that office was disbanded. What do you make of that?”

Trump was asked a similar question a week earlier during his visit to the Centers for Disease Control. He talked in circles for a while before he seized on the notion that nobody could’ve imagined a pandemic. In his words, “Who would have thought we would even be having the subject?”

But when Alcindor spoke up, his initial response was far more direct: “Well, I just think it’s a nasty question.”

Then he reverted to absolving himself of all responsibility for firing the White House pandemic team: “When you say ‘me,’ I didn’t do it…I don’t know anything about it. I mean, you say ‘we’ did that. I don’t know anything about it.”

Alcindor followed up: You don’t know what happened high up in your own administration?

Trump: “It’s the administration, perhaps they do that, let people do.”

Prodded once again by Alcindor, he changed the subject. He launched a long riff about how America’s death toll is low (“we are 40 people right now”), patted his own back for closing borders (the disease is here already), and at various points reiterated his mantra: “We’re doing a great job…We”re doing a great job…We’ve done a great job, we acted quickly, we acted early.”

I’m speechless. I yield the floor to Peter Wehner, a conservative think tank fellow and a White House aide in three previous Republican administrations:

Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest…The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over.

Let’s stay healthy and prove Wehner right in November.