Abstract
It’s fair to say Donald Trump and the “fake nooz” mafia have not been practising responsible social distancing from each other. The coronavirus pandemic in which the US has notched up the highest death toll of any country might have been a moment for president and media to put their differences aside and pull together for the good of the nation.
There was, of course, never any chance of this happening. Instead, both sides see it as their big chance to “seal the deal” – to either win a second Trump term by the blinding brilliance of his response to the pandemic or to finally convince voters, and maybe even some of his base, that this man is an incompetent and dangerous liability.
The consequent pantomime – in which all that’s been missing at the daily presidential (or not so presidential) coronavirus press briefings have been clown shoes and custard pies – have provided politically engaged Americans with “must watch” TV. Some pundits have expressed surprise that Trump would risk exposing himself in this way, but it was surely inevitable. The crumbling US economy, whose previous buoyancy was his strongest card in his re-election hand, rather demanded that he try to make political mileage out of the pandemic.
The brainwave for the daily presidential briefings reportedly came from his son-in-law and power-grabbing aide Jared Kushner and Hope Hicks, his former PR chief – two of the people in the White House he is actually said to listen to. They presumably thought he would look presidential, graciously introducing the experts – and, on paper, America has the best – who would steer the US through the crisis.
Instead, the daily briefings have drawn out Trump’s obsession with getting one over on the media. White House staff believe the briefings are the main reason why Trump has been slipping in polls in which the public says it distrusts the administration’s coronavirus response. Other polls suggest Joe Biden is making ground in key battleground states: given he’s stuck in his basement and we’ve heard barely a peep from him, one has to conclude he’s doing well largely because Trump’s doing wrong.
Trump could have at least basked in the reflected glory of his increasingly revered chief pandemic expert Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Trump doesn’t like to share the stage with anyone for long and his attempts to sideline the doc – whose fate seemed sealed the moment he was photographed smiling ruefully during a Trump Covid-19 diatribe – have served only to highlight the knowledge gulf between the two. The media have helpfully encouraged the virtual deification of Dr Fauci and that of New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a grumpy and charmless Democrat unused to winning much affection from either side, whose daily coronavirus briefings have seemed positively Churchillian compared to those of the president.
White House insiders, realising the briefings were not helpful, predicted Trump would stop them. Instead, he “doubled down”, making them even more embarrassing. They hit a low point in mid-April when a press report on how his administration wasted precious time in January and February responding to the virus, penetrated the world’s thinnest skin. The lights were dimmed for the West Wing briefing and a short video played an election campaign-style film about how right he had been and how wrong the media. The press conference went on for nearly two-and-a-half hours, as Trump jousted with his media opponents. White House press veterans said they had never seen anything like it.
The Punch and Judy nature of these encounters has become predictable – journalists rush out to tell their anchors how awful Trump was, while hours later he goes on Twitter to say the same about the media. He’s back to calling the media the “enemy of the people”. Desperate to take offence, both sides appear interested in scoring a hit than in advancing public understanding of what is being done – or needs to be done – to tackle the pandemic.
A perfect example came when a CBS reporter asked Trump why he saw the response to coronavirus as a global competition. When he replied that she should ask that question of China, the journalist - who is Chinese-American - quickly quizzed him why he asked that question of her. Trump has been blaming China in every other sentence he utters for weeks, so it was fairly obvious (to me, at least) that he’d bring it up again in this context. However, the big story in much of the media was whether - yet again – he had been racist. Oh yes, and misogynist too, as he then refused to take a question from another female reporter, who was trying to make the CBS reporter’s point for her, before abruptly walking out.
To ordinary Americans, facing possible infection, economic meltdown and the worst unemployment rates since the Great Depression, this battle for one-upmanship must increasingly seem like the pettiest of tiffs.
