Two hundred and twelve years ago, the Scottish poet Walter Scott penned this immortal verse: O, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!

O, if only Sir Walter could have heard the memorable beaut disgorged yesterday by the Don of Deception: “I’ve always known this is a real – this is a pandemic…I’ve felt it was a pandemic before it was called a pandemic…I have always viewed it as very serious.”

He always knew it was a pandemic before anyone else? Well, excuse us for having the precisely opposite impression. The only evidence we had was everything he’d ever said. Let’s journey down the Orwellian memory hole.

Jan. 22 (when asked if he was worried about a pandemic): “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

Jan. 24: “It will all work out well.”

Jan. 30: “We have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment – five (infected people). And those people are all recuperating successfully.”

Feb. 10 (after refusing to use tests developed by the World Health Organization): “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

Feb. 19: “I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.”

Feb. 23: The situation is “very much under control…We had 12 (cases) at one point. And now they’ve gotten very much better. Many of them are fully recovered.”

Feb. 26: “We’re going down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up…Within a couple of days it will be down and close to zero.”

Feb. 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear. (There are) 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Feb. 28: “Almost everybody that we see is getting better, and it could be everybody, too.”

Feb. 28 (when Democrats said he wasn’t taking the crisis seriously): “They tried the impeachment hoax…Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”

March 2: “We’re talking about a much smaller range” of deaths than from the flu.”

March 4: “It’s very mild.”

March 7: “I’m not concerned at all. No, I’m not. We’ve done a great job.”

March 9: “The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation.”

March 10: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 13 (on the testing lag): “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”

March 16 (when asked to rate his performance): “I’d rate it a 10.”

March 18 (today): “I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning…The Fake News new narrative is disgraceful & false!”

Sigh. Edward R. Murrow of CBS News, who famously assailed Joe McCarthy (the worst lying liar of the 1950s), spoke these immortal words: “To be persuasive we must be believable. To be believable we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful.”

There may come a day when we will finally disentangle ourselves from Trump’s squalid web and make truth American again. But only if we persevere and make it happen.

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On the Democratic front, Joe Biden crushed Bernie Sanders last night in three more primaries – most notably in swing-state Florida, where Bernie was buried by 39 percentage points.

Yo, Bernie: Get out. There’s no point demanding that primary voters risk their health standing in line, just to reject you over and over again. Their well-being is more important than your overweening ego.