Have President Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings become a liability for him? Some of his Republican allies think so, the New York Times reported: “Many view the sessions as a kind of original sin from which all of his missteps flow, once he gets through his prepared script and turns to his preferred style of extemporaneous bluster and invective.”
Instead of letting the health-care professionals take center stage, Trump “sometimes drowns out his own message,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, told the Times.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board called them “wasted” time for the president.
But Trump clearly likes the briefings. He appears to derive energy from them. So let’s walk through the pros and cons, from his perspective, of keeping these going.
Pro: It’s a way for him to project that he’s in control of the crisis
His administration was unprepared for the coronavirus, despite warnings, and it acted too late and too slowly once it realized the threat.
The coronavirus and its economic impacts will very likely define the November election, and Trump’s slow reaction has been well documented in The Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, Politico and numerous other media outlets.
To contrast that damaging narrative, seven days a week, a serious-looking Trump stands at the lectern at the White House, surrounded by medical experts, and talks about ramping up testing, shipping ventilators to states and starting clinical trials for treatments.
Con: He quickly loses the focus of the briefing
Only the first 20 minutes or so of these sometimes hours-long briefings are about ventilator shipments and the like. At some point, he turns the briefing over to his task force and other Cabinet secretaries. The rest, Trump devotes to sparring with the media, throwing out completely unfounded theories about voter fraud by mail-in ballots and getting many of his facts wrong, like the number of tests the United States has done, or that other countries are hiding the number of cases they have.
And then he attacks his political opponents, like former vice president Joe Biden or Democratic governors and leaders of Congress. That particularly irked the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board, which writes: “The President’s outbursts against his political critics are also notably off key at this moment. This isn’t impeachment, and Covid-19 isn’t shifty Schiff. It’s a once-a-century threat to American life and livelihood.”
As a result of his factual inaccuracies, some cable news outlets have stopped consistently carrying all of his remarks live.
Pro: He can respond to the media in real time
It’s a chance for him to defend himself from those damaging media reports about his administration’s slow responses. On Saturday, the day The Post published its chronicle of how the administration fumbled 70 days of warnings about the virus, he started his briefing by deriding “fake news.”
To the extent that bashing journalists is a pro for him (it certainly is popular with his hardcore supporters), he’s done it a lot in these briefings. Trump snapped at NBC’s Peter Alexander last month when Alexander asked Trump what he’d say to Americans who are scared: “I’d say you’re a terrible reporter.”
“Only CNN would ask a question like that,” Trump said Sunday when a CNN reporter asked him why he doesn’t just let the clinical trials for potential treatments play out and have science dictate whether they work.
And he continued his habit of delivering particularly harsh rebukes to black female reporters: “Don’t be threatening. Be nice,” he said in March when PBS “NewsHour” reporter Yamiche Alcindor asked him about his comments on how many ventilators New York needs.
Con: Journalists can respond to him in real time
Journalists can and have been rereading Trump’s own damaging words about the virus back to him, forcing him to either deny what he has clearly said (which Trump has done on several times, including to Alcindor’s question), or to defend why he downplayed the virus for so long. Those moments have created awkward and even potentially politically damaging moments for Trump, given even his own advisers say his election will rise and fall on whether Americans think he responded quickly and effectively enough to the coronavirus.
On Tuesday, a reporter read Trump his own comments from around the time intelligence reports and a top adviser were warning of the virus: “You said within a couple of days, the cases will be down to zero.”
“Well, the cases really didn’t build up for a while,” he said, which isn’t true. They have grown exponentially.
Then he repeated something he said last week: that he knew things could get bad, but he didn’t want to warn Americans. “I’m a cheerleader for this country,” he said. “I don’t want to create havoc and shock and everything else.”
So far, his defense has been that he didn’t want to alarm Americans about a pandemic that his own adviser was warning about and that has indeed turned out to be very deadly.
Pro: The briefings are getting a lot of viewers
Trump has cited this as one of the top reasons to keep going. If your perspective is that all attention is good attention, this is a pro.
The Wall Street Journal always “forgets” to mention that the ratings for the White House Press Briefings are “through the roof” (Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale, according to @nytimes) & is only way for me to escape the Fake News & get my views across. WSJ is Fake News!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 9, 2020
Con: It’s not clear if that’s the case anymore
Major cable outlets like CNN and MSNBC have stopped airing these briefings in their entirety.
