And so do his supporters. It makes an extremely effective political combination: all the enthusiasm of winning without actually doing anything. And it works as long as you can have goodwill and assets to burn.

Except when something happens that defies spin, like a pandemic that takes away jobs and lives.

I'm not sure how this is going to turn out, but even if the US elects a different president, the current one has provided a nice handbook to a potential autocratic future president to gain unlimited power.

I suspect that even a pandemic may not suffice. The only thing that gets through is a direct personal loss, and the death rate seems too low for that. You'd need deaths in the millions for everyone to know someone who died.

Even then it's easy to blame it on someone else. There's a reason they are calling it the Wuhan Virus.