Trump TV briefings avoid confronting a world changed by coronavirus
President Donald Trump at a coronavirus task force briefing last week. Credit: AP / Alex Brandon
The coronavirus death toll for the U.S. passed 55,000 as of Monday. That official count, still rising, will prove low once we know more and look back in the coming months.
This emergency is like none other. Millions are out of work. States are besieged for public assistance. Businesses fly blind into dangerous territory. Top doctors talk of a second COVID-19 wave in the fall, coupled with flu season. The national deficit explodes. Local governments go broke; financial markets go haywire. Hospitals struggle. Communities far from New York brace for their outbreaks. Election schedules, school years and sports seasons are threatened.
Talk of "reopening" the economy on this or that date makes it sound as if the nation is one big store or mall that needs nothing more than to let the customers and employees back inside. But some commercial habits might be changing forever, for better or worse. The future looks foreboding everywhere.
Against this backdrop, we have the haphazard daily "news" briefings of President Donald Trump. From these, we have learned again that Trump can't be bothered to explain himself, that he will not stop whining about the media, and that he will not quit blaming government failure on the opposing party.
Eyes fixed in the mirror, he behaves as he did before.
Some viewers express the harsh if well-founded view that despite a deep crisis, the president spitballs in public like a foggy-headed quack. To be fair, he didn't precisely announce Thursday that everyone should immediately ingest bleach or disinfectant or use a sun lamp internally. But it might have been a good idea if he'd told people, even after the gaffe: "Don't try this at home." He left common-sense precautions to others.
These briefings have offered a talk-show escape laced with the sullen and the silly — rather than a straightforward report on our hard new realities.
Suddenly, political alarms have rung from his White House handlers who say he's overexposed himself. As Axios reported Friday, his most trusted advisers have urged Trump to cease his infomercial-style marathons. On Saturday, Trump advanced a false alibi as he sounded a retreat, lamenting on Twitter about "nothing but hostile questions" from "Lamestream Media."
"Not worth the time & effort!" huffed the petulant celebrity.
Trump's confused exchange Thursday about sunlight and disinfectant created a unique fiasco. Nobody should be shocked. Over and over he has nattered fictitiously about wind turbines causing cancer. He's talked about taking coal out of the ground and cleaning it — which is not even how the concept of "clean coal" is purported to work.
He's said strange things about how toilets function in the White House, evoked a mystery computer "server" supposedly held in Ukraine. He's prattled about Hillary Clinton "bleaching" emails as if they'd been erased with Clorox, and urged California to "rake" its forests to prevent fires. From firefighters to Cabinet officials, nobody could make head nor tail of what he was suggesting.
Call these befuddled Trump moments delusions, errors, misunderstandings or hoaxes. Whichever you pick, he won't follow up with a clear explanation of exactly what he meant. The pandemic hasn't changed the way the president's funhouse mirror works. From the start, anyone seeking useful information has had to turn elsewhere.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
