The facility at issue? The White House complex. Unlike most employers, it has the ability to conduct frequent testing and to ensure that employees have the necessary protective equipment. Also unlike most employers, one of its employees could ensure that testing is more broadly available. Instead, President Trump and his spokesperson, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, have insisted that the robust testing that spotted the infected White House staffers is not necessary at other institutions.

During a short news briefing on Friday, McEnany was asked about reports that a staffer for Vice President Pence had tested positive for the virus. She confirmed that the staffer had.

Why, she was asked, should average Americans feel comfortable going to work if even the White House wasn’t protected from the virus?

“We have put in place the guidelines that experts have put forward to keep this building safe, which means contact tracing, all of the recommended guidelines we have for businesses that have essential workers we’re now putting in place here in the White House,” McEnany replied. “So as America reopens safely, the White House is continuing to operate safely.”

“Contact tracing” means identifying people in contact with infected individuals so that they can be isolated and tested, limiting the reach of the virus. What McEnany glosses over is that the ability to follow the guidelines depends on available resources. In an interview with Politico, a restaurant owner outlined the challenges he faced to reopening.

“You’ve gotta check the employees when they get here — but we can’t find a thermometer to buy,” he told Politico’s Tim Alberta. “We’ve gotta have masks, but we can’t find enough, so we’re making some. We’ve gotta have mass amounts of hand sanitizer, so I’ve been calling the liquor distilleries to buy some from them.”

The White House has no such problems, as McEnany made clear later in the briefing.

“I can just tell you that we’ve taken every single precaution to protect the president, the same guidelines that our experts have put in place,” she said. “We clean the facility. We social distance. We keep people six feet away from one another. So we’ve done every single thing that Dr. [Deborah] Birx and Dr. [Anthony] Fauci” — two key members of the coronavirus task force — “have asked us to do.”

“I can assure the American people that their commander in chief is protected,” she added.

No, she can’t — as both she and Trump pointed out this week.

Trump was asked about his valet during a lengthy interview Friday on “Fox and Friends.” The valet was off over the weekend and on Monday, Trump said, suggesting that perhaps he had been infected during that time. On Tuesday, he was in the room with both Trump and Pence, but the president didn’t think there was any “contact.” After, Trump was tested, and the results were negative.

“He’s a fine young guy, so it’s just one of those things,” Trump said. “And this is why testing isn’t — we have the best testing in the world, but testing is not necessarily the answer because they were testing him — they tested him four days before. And, you know, now I guess everybody is being tested every day. Testing only goes so far.”

This is akin to what McEnany said on Wednesday when asked about testing.

“Let’s dismiss a myth about tests right now,” she said. “If we tested every single American in this country at this moment, we’d have to retest them an hour later, and then an hour later after that. Because at any moment, you could theoretically contract this virus. So the notion that everyone needs to be tested is just simply nonsensical.”

The point each is making is that someone can be tested and, shortly afterward, contract the virus. And that’s accurate. But it serves more as a rejection of McEnany’s assurances about the extent to which Trump can be protected than a rebuttal to the idea that widespread testing is useful. No one thinks that testing every American every minute is necessary, but it is clear that testing smaller groups of people regularly can help track and contain outbreaks. Yes, testing didn’t keep the valet and the Pence staffer from getting sick, but it almost certainly kept other White House staffers from getting sick, which is a key part of the point.

Trump is one of the best-protected individuals in the country because he works in an environment that has no shortage of protective equipment, an ability to keep employees separated as needed and the availability of frequent, rapid testing. While there’s no guarantee that he won’t be infected, despite McEnany’s claims, he is in much better position than most employees are at their places of employment.

That other employers are not as well positioned is, to some degree, a function of his insistence that they don’t need to be.