Trump talks himself up as 'wartime president' to lead America through a crisis

Bill Clinton used to lament that his time as US president was broadly peaceful, and lacked a historic test of his mettle. Donald Trump believes that his moment has arrived: a crisis on a par with leading a nation at war. Lay off those war metaphors, world leaders. You could be the next casualty… “I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president,” he said at the White House this week as he belatedly comprehended the epic scale of the coronavirus pandemic, which in the US alone has infected more than 19,000 people and killed more than 200. “I mean, that’s what we’re fighting.” The world witnessed two Trumps in often jarring conflict last week, sometimes in the same breath. One was...