Pinocchio Pence casts off reality and insists everything's under control | David Smith's sketch

Mike Pence is the guy you’d want in your foxhole. You might be out of ammo, bleeding profusely and about to be run over by a tank, but the hard-praying vice-president would assure you that total victory is assured and it will all be over by Christmas.

The Baghdad Bob of Washington was on top form on Friday, reassuring an anguished nation that up is down, square is round and an all-time high of daily coronavirus infections is proof positive that America has flattened the curve.

Sans face mask, Pence was holding his first White House coronavirus task force briefing in nearly two months – not at the White House at all but at the health department, a sign of diminished status since the halcyon days when Donald Trump pondered the efficacy of bleach.

The vice-president will have impressed his boss with his truthiness.

“We have made truly remarkable progress in moving our nation forward,” Pence declared, against a backdrop of nearly 2.5m infections and 125,000 deaths, the worst tallies on the planet. “As we stand here today, all 50 states and the territories across this country are opening up safely and responsibly.”

Pinocchio! On Friday Texas, where cases have topped 130,000, became the first state to reimpose a lockdown that had previously been lifted. Florida closed down bars after a record one-day high of 8,942 infections.

“We slowed the spread, we flattened the curve, we saved lives,” Pence went on, a day after America saw a record 40,000 new cases nationwide. “There may be a tendency among Americans to think we’re in a time of great losses and great hardship on the American people, like we were two months ago. But in reality, we’re in a much better place.”

Yes, Pence admitted, we are now seeing cases “rise precipitously across the south”, but always look on the bright side of life: “Thirty-four states across the country … are experiencing a measure of stability.”

He echoed Trump by claiming “it’s almost inarguable that more testing is generating more cases”. But experts have noted that a rise in the percentage of positive cases shows that this does not explain away the rates.

Pence was questioned over why Trump is still holding campaign rallies, Paula Reid of CBS News asking: “You’re telling people to listen to local officials, but in Tulsa you defied them to have an event that resulted in dozen of people being quarantined. How can you say the campaign isn’t part of the problem?”

His response was like Alexa or Siri defaulting to a programmed response and thereby satisfying no one: “Freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble is enshrined in the constitution of the United States and, even in a health crisis, the American people don’t forfeit our constitutional rights.”

Drs Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, who had been virtually banished from the public gaze like embarrassing relatives, returned to action with masks and sobering graphics. Fauci offered a reality check: “We are facing a serious problem in certain areas.”

But health secretary Alex Azar decided to rival Pence in the sycophancy stakes, somehow conjuring the phrase “major public health victory”.

Trump has been described as the worst possible person to lead America through this crisis. Friday was a reminder that Pence may be the second worst. When in February he was appointed head of the taskforce, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted his failures to tackle HIV as governor of Indiana and tweeted: “Mike Pence literally does not believe in science.”

Pence once claimed the pandemic in the US would be “behind us” by Memorial Day – 25 May. At the latest briefing, the devout Christian finally revealed his secret plan: “Pray, and keep praying.”

The response of public health experts was duly withering. Dr Irwin Redlener of Columbia University told MSNBC: “George Orwell could have called his book 2020 as opposed to 1984. It was a stunning example of misrepresenting reality.”