In the photo above, the President of the United States reviews a page displaying a bar chart with four long, wide colored bars that his staff has armed him with for his interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios.

As Donald Trump is wont to do, he spouts nonsense during several exchanges with Swan. He fails to acknowledge, or apparently even comprehend, the points Swan makes. I know Trump is a showman. I grant that he has no qualms about lying. But my take is: his confusion is genuine, not a charade adapted for television.

Unable to apprehend conclusive evidence of his own failure, he grasps at charts and notes on paper that — as is evident to anyone not constrained by blinders imposed by narcissism — can’t possibly relieve him of responsibility for a terrible, tragic death toll that continues to mount month after month in our country. (The current count: 156,426 Americans have lost their lives. It will be tens of thousands more by election day.)

And if I’m wrong, if Donald Trump is actually just putting on a show — playing dumb — that’s even more damning.

President Donald J. Trump: Take a look at some of these charts.

Jonathan Swan: I’d love to.

President: We’re gonna look.

Swan: Let’s look.

President: And, if you look at death —

Swan: Yeah. Started to go up again.

President: Here’s one. Well, right here, United States is lowest in numerous categories. We’re lower than the world.

Swan: Lower than the world? …

President: Lower than Europe.

Swan: In what? In what?

President: Take a look. Right there. Here’s case deaths.

Swan: Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad, much worse than South Korea, Germany, et cetera.

President: You can’t, you can’t do that.

Swan: Why can’t I do that?

President: You have to go by, you have to go by where — Look. Here is the United States. You have to go by the cases. The cases are there.

Swan: Why not as a proportion of population?

President: When you have somebody — What it says is, when you have somebody that has it, where there’s a case —

Swan: Oh, okay.

President: The people that live from those cases.

Swan: Oh. It’s surely a relevant statistic to say, if the U.S. has X population and X percentage of death of that population versus South Korea —

President: No. Because you have to go by the cases.

Swan: Well, look at South Korea, for example. 51 million population, 300 deaths. It’s like, it’s crazy compared to —

President: You don’t know that.

Swan: I do.

President: You don’t know that.

Swan: You think they’re faking their statistics, South Korea? An advanced country?

President: I won’t get into that because I have a very good relationship with the country.

Swan: Yeah.

President: But you don’t know that. And they have spikes. Look, here’s one of —

Swan: Germany, low, 9,000.

President: Here’s one. Here’s one right here, United States.

Swan: Let me look.

President: You take the number of cases.

Swan: Okay.

President: Now look, we’re last, meaning we’re first.

Swan: Last? I don’t know what we’re first in.

President: We have the best.

Swan: As a what?

President: Take a look again. It’s cases.

Swan: Okay. I’ll just … okay.

President: And we have cases because of the testing.

Swan: I mean, a thousand Americans die a day. But I understand. I understand on the cases, it’s different.

President: No, but you’re not reporting it correctly, Jonathan.

Swan: I think I am, but —

President: If you take a look at this other chart … look, this is our testing. I believe this is the testing. Yeah.

Swan: Yeah. We do more tests.

President: No, wait a minute. Well, don’t we get credit for that? And, because we do more tests, we have more cases. In other words, we test more. We have — Now, take a look. The top one, that’s a good thing not a bad thing. But the top … Jonathan — …

Swan: If hospitals rates were going down and deaths were going down, I’d say, ‘Terrific.’ You would deserve to be praised for testing.

President: Well, they don’t even —

Swan: But they are all going up.

President: Well, they very rarely talk —

Swan: Plus, 60,000 Americans are in hospital, A thousand dying a day.

President: If you watch the news or read the papers, they usually talk about new cases, new cases, new cases.

Swan: I’m talking about death.

President: Well, you look at death.

Swan: It’s going up.

President: Death is way down from where it was.

Swan: It’s a thousand a day.

President: Death —

Swan: It was two and a half thousand. It went down to 500. Now, it’s going up again.

President: Death — Excuse me. Where it was is much higher than where it is right now.

Swan: It went down and then it went up again.

President: It spiked, but now it’s going down again.

Swan: It’s going up.

President: It’s gone down in Arizona. It’s going down in Florida.

Swan: Nationally it’s going up.

President: It’s going down in Texas. Take a look at this. These are the tests.

Swan: It’s going down in Florida?

President: Yeah. It leveled out and it’s going down. That’s my report as of yesterday.