WASHINGTON — For weeks, President Trump’s allies have defended his early efforts to downplay the coronavirus threat by saying he was just being optimistic – a cheerleader for the country – and that it didn’t actually affect the response.

But a new flap reinforces the potential danger of Trump’s see-no-evil approach to the combating the virus because it recalls when Trump’s allergy to bad news and dire predictions might have cost us valuable time early in the fight.

Trump on Wednesday morning took issue with the media’s portrayal of comments from the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield. In a Washington Post interview published Tuesday, Redfield had warned that a second wave of the virus this winter could actually be worse than the one we are currently riding.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” Redfield told The Post’s Lena H. Sun. “We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.”

In a tweet Wednesday, Trump alleged Redfield had been misquoted. But he accused CNN of having done so, though CNN merely relayed the comments published by The Post.

“CDC Director was totally misquoted by Fake News @CNN on Covid 19,” Trump wrote. “He will be putting out a statement.”

That statement hasn’t yet arrived, more than four hours later, and the CDC hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment. Redfield’s Twitter feed promoted The Post’s story on Tuesday night.

It’s also not clear exactly what Trump thinks was misquoted. His tweet came at 10:17 a.m., and a transcript of CNN’s coverage at that time shows the network accurately paraphrasing Redfield’s comments. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany later told reporters that Redfield’s comments were being taken out of context because he was urging people to get flu shots. But McEnany didn’t challenge the quotes or the underlying sentiment at all.

All that aside, what’s apparent is that Trump is again bristling at a health official offering too dire a scenario.

Another time that happened was Feb. 25. That day, another top CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, made big news by warning that the spread of the virus in the United States was “inevitable” and that “we need to be preparing for significant disruption in our lives.”

As The Post reported March 7, this set Trump off:

“CDC officials had informed HHS officials in advance of the theme of Messonnier’s comments, and no one from HHS gave any indication immediately afterward that there was any problem. ‘Nobody thought the messages were wrong,’ the official said.

“But Trump, watching from abroad in India, was furious at what he viewed as her alarmist rhetoric, which he feared would further tank the already gyrating markets. Word trickled back that Messonnier’s blunt talk was ‘just too early.’ ”

That may seem like the usual kind of internal squabble that has characterized the Trump administration. But there is evidence that it actually mattered. That’s because it reportedly affected what health officials would do in the days and weeks to come.

The New York Times has reported that health officials around the time of Messonnier’s comments had decided that stricter countermeasures were needed to combat the spread of the virus. But when they saw how Messonnier’s comments had played with Trump, they backed off actually bringing him that recommendation.

Here’s the key paragraph from the Times’ reconstruction:

Department of Health and Human Services official Robert “Kadlec and other administration officials decided the next day (Feb. 24) to recommend to Mr. Trump that he publicly support the start of these mitigation efforts, such as school closings. But before they could discuss it with the president, who was returning from India, another official went public with a warning, sending the stock market down sharply and angering Mr. Trump. The meeting to brief him on the recommendation was canceled and it was three weeks before Mr. Trump would reluctantly come around to the need for mitigation.”

In other words: Trump’s reaction had a material impact on how quickly health officials acted. We can’t say with any certainty that them making that recommendation would have changed anything, but Trump’s reaction clearly had a chilling effect. And the measures they were seeking wouldn’t happen until weeks later.

The situation now is similar, if less immediate. Redfield seems to be concerned enough about a second wave this winter that he’s putting out word early – perhaps in hopes that we can adjust our approach to be ready to deal with that eventuality. Trump is signaling that he doesn’t want to hear it, though, and it’s not hard to see how that could hamper the preparedness for such a second wave.

And as much as anything, it reinforces that Trump’s posture toward the virus hasn’t just been about optimism, but instead about a resistance to the reality that his own health officials have tried to convey. Given everything that’s transpired over the last three months – and the many warnings we’ve discovered that apparently weren’t heeded – it’s difficult to dismiss that as some kind of triviality.