The inadvertently revealing timeline was not the only flaw with the propaganda video produced by Scavino, Trump’s former caddie.

It began with a sequence lifted directly from the March 26 edition of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show: a series of clips of medical experts for ABC, NBC and CBS wrongly predicting in January that Americans would not be badly hit by the virus. Those clips seemed to be included as an effort to embarrass reporters from those networks, but their statements at the time were almost identical to the comments from Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC director, who said at a coronavirus task force briefing on Jan. 31: “I want to emphasize that this is a serious health situation in China, but I want to emphasize that the risk to the American public currently is low.”

That opening montage also includes a misleadingly edited clip of Hannity asking Dr. Anthony Fauci in January if American experts might go to China if the coronavirus outbreak there was worse than expected. In March Hannity tried to claim that this was proof that he had “warned” of a pandemic. In fact, before that clip was edited it showed that Hannity had just been asking Fauci about sending American experts to China to “help them out to try to contain this” there. Like Trump, Hannity had spent all of February comparing Covid-19 to the seasonal flu, and by the end of March he too was backpedalling furiously.

Another bizarre aspect of that sequence is that it ends with Dr. David Agus, a CBS News medical correspondent, stating that “coronavirus is not going to cause a major issue in the United States.” Agus is now a major proponent of the experimental use of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 and has reportedly spoken directly with Trump about the possible benefits of the treatment that the president has become fixated on.

The third section of the video — about Trump’s supposedly unfair treatment by political opponents — takes audio of the Times correspondent Maggie Haberman out of context to distort its meaning. Haberman was one of six reporters who wrote the article that angered Trump. In an interview with “The Daily” in March, Haberman did call Trump’s order to slow travel from China “a pretty aggressive measure against the spread of the virus,” but the White House edit omitted what she said immediately after that. “The problem is, it was one of the last things that he did for several weeks.”

“He did not do anything after that in terms of alerting the public, or telling people to be safe, or telling people to take precautions,” Haberman added, according to a transcript of the original interview. “And it basically squandered several weeks within the U.S.”

That same sequence included two false annotations in on-screen text of other statements by Haberman about Trump’s partial ban of travel from China. When she said, “He was accused of xenophobia,” an image of Joe Biden appeared, over the date March 12. Biden, however, was not referring to Trump’s travel ban in a speech he gave on that date; he was criticizing Trump’s nativist reference the day before, when he had shut off travel from most of Europe, to what the president called the “foreign virus.”

“Downplaying it, being overly dismissive or spreading misinformation is only going to hurt us and further advantage the spread of the disease, but neither should we panic or fall back on xenophobia,” Biden said. “Labeling Covid-19 a foreign virus does not displace accountability for the misjudgments that have benn taken thus far by the Trump administration.”

The fact that Trump subsequently made a point of calling the new coronavirus “the Chinese Virus,” inciting hatred of Asians and Asian-Americans even in his own White House, makes his claim to have been falsely accused of xenophobia all the more absurd.

Moments later in the video, as Haberman said, “He was accused of making a racist move,” an image of Nancy Pelosi appeared, over a citation to The Hill from Jan. 31. However, as the report in The Hill makes clear, Pelosi had, in fact, been referring to another travel ban issued by Trump that day — “adding Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Tanzania and Sudan to the travel ban that the President instituted three years ago” — when she denounced him for imposing “such biased and bigoted restrictions.”

The news conference on Monday, which brought the president’s time in the briefing room in past month to more than 40 hours, was yet another example of Trump hijacking for his own ends what was previously a news conference dedicated to conveying vital information about a public health emergency. The president, however, seems to regard the free time on television each day as primarily an opportunity for self-promotion.

That was made clear at one stage when Trump told reporters that, after watching the video, “most importantly, we’re going to get back on to the reason we’re here: which is, the success we’re having.”