If Donald Trump is to somehow win re-election as president in November, he badly needs support from Republican leaders in Congress and governors around the country.

But Trump’s seeming indifference to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic appears to be alienating many such vital allies.

“In recent days, some of the most prominent figures in the GOP outside the White House have broken with Mr. Trump over issues like the value of wearing a mask in public and heeding the advice of health experts like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci,” reports the New York Times.

And the pandemic continues to worsen by the day. On Monday morning, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Tracker showed 3,774,769 Americans have contracted Covid-19; 140,541 have died.

So why, little more than three months from election day, would Trump shrug off a health crisis that has consumed the entire country and devastated the economy?

“The president got bored with it,” David Carney, an adviser to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, told the Times.

“The president got bored with it,” David Carney, an adviser to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, said of the pandemic. He noted that Mr. Abbott, a Republican, directs his requests to Mr. Pence, with whom he speaks two to three times a week.

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— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) July 20, 2020

As a result, Abbott speaks often about the pandemic not with Trump, but with Vice President Mike Pence, Carney says.

CNN’s analysis of a weekend interview on Fox News concludes that Trump’s priority regarding Covid-19 is not about the suffering of others, but about his own ego.

“Not bothering to hide his indifference and contempt for science, the President made clear on Sunday that it’s more important to him to be ultimately proven right about the pandemic than to reconsider his disastrous approach that is doing little to stop its deadly spread,” CNN says.

“I’ll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again,” Trump told Fox’s Chris Wallace, adding “I’ve been right probably more than anybody else.”

Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska is among the few top Republicans willing to directly criticize the White House — in particular, Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro,  who was fiercely critical of Dr. Fauci in an op-ed article last week.

“I want the whole White House to start acting like a team on a mission to tackle a real problem,” Sasse told the Times.

“Navarro’s Larry, Moe and Curly junior-high slap fight this week is yet another way to undermine public confidence that these guys grasp that tens of thousands of Americans have died and tens of millions are out of work,” Sasse said.