They have to move the goalposts in an effort to convince themselves that Trump is doing a good job. Trump has moved the goalposts himself:
Trump: "When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done"
Then he says this:
Trump: “So if we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000, it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 [thousand] and 200,000, we altogether have done a very good job.”
That's not leadership, that's incompetence.