Staring down defeat, Trump attempts a coronavirus
reset
The president’s about-face replaced his dismissive
tone about the pandemic with a stark new warning and a mostly disciplined
message — for now.
By GABBY
ORR
07/21/2020
09:07 PM EDT
A month
ago, he insisted the novel coronavirus was “dying out” in the U.S. As the
pandemic overwhelmed huge swaths of the nation, he maintained the threat was
“fading away.” Health officials across the nation begged him for more attention
on the widening health crisis — and he wanted little to do with them.
On Tuesday,
President Donald Trump flipped his script with a grim new assessment of the
global pandemic — and at last applied an approach that aides implored him to
take earlier in his pandemic response.
Compared to
previous disorderly spectacles that sometimes exceeded two hours, Trump’s
appearance at a White House lectern on Tuesday hinted that significant changes
are underway as he and his aides refocus their attention on the No. 1 threat standing
between them and a second term. The format of the briefing — a mostly scripted,
solo Trump — also suggested a detente was reached among opposing White House
factions that spent the past few weeks clashing over the role their embattled
boss should play in responding to the alarming resurgence of Covid-19 in
southern and southwestern states.
A senior
administration official said Trump’s relatively disciplined performance was
likely to neutralize objections that some aides had raised in recent days over
allowing him to participate in televised coronavirus updates. White House chief
of staff Mark Meadows, along with senior adviser Jared Kushner and top
officials on the president's reelection campaign, had previously urged him to
tether his reelection message to the economy and other issues instead of
constantly dwelling on the deadly virus.
Instead,
after weeks of pressuring schools to commit to reopening and touting his plan
to reboot the U.S. economy, Trump vowed on Tuesday to pursue a “very powerful
strategy” to contain the virus and ensure rapid distribution of the first
available vaccine. Despite some Trumpian flourishes — he repeatedly referred to
it as the “China virus” and claimed other countries are begging the U.S. for
assistance — the president managed to stick to the subject matter at hand,
warning that the spike in cases “will probably, unfortunately, get worse before
it gets better,” and encouraging young Americans to avoid bars and wear
protective masks when necessary.
It was a
message even his strongest supporters were hoping to see after weeks of
watching Trump dodge or downplay a threat that’s consuming states critical to
his reelection in just over 100 days.
“President
Trump provided an important reality check about Covid-19,” said Alfredo Ortiz,
chief executive of the Job Creators Network and a member of the president’s
“Latinos for Trump” campaign coalition, in a statement following the briefing.
Trump’s
renewed participation in updates on the virus came as his administration
grapples with a Covid-19 resurgence that has eroded months of progress, and
increased demands from state officials for a straightforward national strategy.
Since Trump’s last appearance at a briefing for the coronavirus task force in
late April, confirmed cases of the deadly virus have increased nearly fourfold
in the U.S. while deaths have surpassed 140,000.
Initially,
Trump dismissed the alarming case spikes as the result of increased testing. As
hospitalization rates ticked upward in numerous states earlier this month, he
claimed during a July 4 speech that “99 percent” of Covid-19 infections are
“totally harmless” — a statement that roiled some members of the administration’s
own task force and ran counter to scientific evidence suggesting more serious
risks. But a shift in rhetoric among prominent Republicans, along with pressure
from Vice President Mike Pence and top health officials, forced Trump and his
inner circle to reevaluate their approach to the coronavirus messaging.
“The China
virus is a vicious and dangerous illness,” Trump said Tuesday, joined only by
his press secretary and a dozen reporters in the briefing room. “Some areas of
our country are doing well; others are doing less well.”
“My
administration will stop at nothing to save lives and shield the vulnerable,
which is so important,” he added.
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Rather than
limiting his engagement on coronavirus to boost the time he spends on more
politically expedient topics, Trump and his aides are now expected to refocus
his attention to the global pandemic and the next economic relief package currently
underway on Capitol Hill.
“So we’ll
be doing these quite often. We’re going to keep you abreast of this and we’ll
also talk about some of the other topics like our economy, which is doing
well,” Trump said at the conclusion of his appearance on Tuesday.
Ahead of
the news conference, a second administration official said the president was
likely to make weekly appearances in the briefing room or Rose Garden to update
the public on the pandemic, the development of a Covid-19 vaccine and other
efforts to reboot the economy and reopen educational and childcare facilities.
The
expected increase in Trump’s official appearances is not without risk.
White House
aides and Trump’s campaign team put an end to his daily coronavirus updates
earlier this spring after they devolved into rambling news conferences replete
with erroneous health claims, false statements about testing and therapy
treatments, along with backbiting insults toward governors who implemented
strict stay-at-home orders, criticized the administration’s response or, in the
unusual case of Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, reopened non-essential
industries too quickly.
Multiple
polls conducted in late April, near the end of Trump’s briefing run, found
growing levels of distrust in the president as a reliable source of information
on the pandemic.
Some White
House allies urged Trump ahead of his Tuesday appearance to employ a different
format this time around — one where he avoids skirmishes with reporters, shows
empathy and provides clear examples of how his administration is dealing with
the devastating public health crisis.
“Talk
personally. Show you care,” tweeted Ari Fleischer, press secretary to President
George W. Bush, adding that the resurrected briefings are “a mistake” for the
incumbent Republican president.
Whether
Trump will continue to heed the advice of Fleischer or others in his orbit
remains unclear; the president has repeatedly veered back into his
undisciplined approaches, just as he did in March even after winning a moment
of praise for a more somber tone about the crisis.
During an
Oval Office photo op on Monday, he cast the string of briefings he participated
in earlier this year as “very successful” despite their overlap with steep
declines in both his approval rating and voter confidence in his handling of
the novel coronavirus.
“I was
doing them and we had a lot of people watching, record numbers watching in the
history of cable television… And we were doing very well,” he said.
At the
time, many of the administration’s allies worried that Trump was overexposing
himself to voters. Recognizing their boss’s proclivity for exaggerated
statements and heated exchanges with the press, the briefings left several
White House officials on edge – wondering which comment or critique would
generate the next news cycle and whether it would further impair his bid for a
second term. Some of the briefings surpassed two hours and featured
contradicting information from the president and health officials.
When Trump
took the podium on Tuesday, it was clear aides had persuaded him to strike a
different tone. The president, who has struggled to define his 2020 opponent or
outline a convincing message for reelection, veered off track only once to
address a question about the recent arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate
of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died by apparent suicide while
in federal custody last summer.
“I haven’t
really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her
numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I
guess they lived in Palm Beach,” he said.
The brief
response was a reminder of the risks associated with Trump’s return to the
briefing room, where his previous willingness to participate in hour-long
grillings generated unflattering news cycles for his administration.
The
president took 16 questions on Tuesday and was in and out of the cramped room
in less than a half hour, a development that one of the administration
officials described as “a step in the right direction.”
Trump shifts messaging: Coronavirus ‘will get
worse before it gets better’
In the first such briefing in three months, the
president acknowledged the real scope of the pandemic’s impact in the U.S.
By CAITLIN
OPRYSKO
07/21/2020
06:43 PM EDT
Updated:
07/21/2020 07:47 PM EDT
President
Donald Trump on Tuesday diverged from his upbeat and dismissive rhetoric about
the threat of Covid-19 during his first coronavirus briefing in nearly three
months, exercising discipline as he read largely from a script and
acknowledging the real scope of the virus as cases and fatalities climb to
record levels across the country.
Speaking
alone from the lectern in the White House briefing room, Trump issued one of
his strongest pleas yet for Americans to wear face masks, and acknowledged that
the pandemic “will get worse before it gets better” — an admission that comes
as approval for his handling of the pandemic and his job approval in general
have plummeted and put him in the position of underdog less than four months
from Election Day.
Still, six
months after the virus was first diagnosed on U.S. shores, Trump asserted that
his administration was “in the process of developing a strategy” to eradicate
the virus, after months of casting the U.S. response as one of the best in the world.
Trump’s
shift in tone, along with the return of the coronavirus briefing, comes as the
latest surge in cases has become impossible to ignore. Close to 4 million
Americans have contracted the virus, though data from the CDC indicates the
true number of infections could be 10 times greater.
His
comments also come as the country returned to another grim milestone, recording
more than 1,000 daily deaths from the coronavirus for the first time since May.
Confirmed
U.S. Cases: 3,897,465 | U.S. Deaths: 141,972
“As one
family, we mourn every precious life that’s been lost,” Trump said at the
beginning of prepared remarks, one of the most specific acknowledgments in some
time of the more than 140,000 Americans killed by the virus. The president
pledged to develop a vaccine for the virus “in their honor,” though he later
reverted to his insistence that the pathogen would one day just disappear.
The president
touted progress on the developments of coronavirus therapies, including the
antiviral medication remdesivir, which he said had “significantly reduced the
severity and duration of the disease.” The government is rationing its limited
supplies of the drug, however.
Notably
absent from Trump’s speech was any mention of the malaria drug
hydroxychloroquine, which he has repeatedly touted as a treatment for
Covid-19the disease caused by the coronavirus. It has been proven ineffective
against the virus in multiple clinical trials, and can cause heart problems.
Trump also
repeated promises that a coronavirus vaccine is on the way, but his own health
officials have been cautious not to make promises about a specific timeline for
an effective vaccine.
There are a
number of potential vaccine candidates currently in trials. One candidate
developed by Moderna in partnership with the National Institutes of Health is
expected to enter the final stage of human trials at the end of the month.
Still, the
president’s briefing was a dramatic departure from just weeks ago when he
sought to claim that 99 percent of coronavirus cases were “totally harmless”
(on Tuesday, he described the virus as “vicious and dangerous”), equivocated on
the issue of wearing masks in public to cut down transmission (Trump said at
the White House that “whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact”)
and played down soaring case numbers as small "embers" of outbreaks
resulting from more testing and as a byproduct of reopening the economy.
As Trump
stuck largely to his script, he spoke Tuesday of a “concerning rise” in cases
and for the most part steered clear of some of the more striking proclamations
that led the once-daily briefings to be canceled in the first place — including
his suggestion that experts look into injecting disinfectants as a potential
treatment.
For the
most part, Trump ditched the hyperbole that would often need to be cleaned up
moments later by Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response
coordinator; Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases; or Vice President Mike Pence.
He even
appeared to acknowledge shortcomings in U.S. testing capabilities, promising
that his administration was “working to reduce turnaround time” as governors
across the nation complain about a lack of testing supplies and delayed results
of sometimes a week or more that undermine the notion of contact tracing.
At the same
time, he claimed that the White House “currently has zero … unfulfilled
requests for equipment or anything else that they need from the governors.”
Trump kept
things relatively short, with Tuesday’s briefing clocking in at just 26
minutes, compared with rambling sessions earlier this year that could last 90
minutes to two hours.
It’s
unclear whether Trump, who has long struggled with consistency and message
discipline, will be able to maintain even the small shift he demonstrated on
Tuesday. But the return of the briefing and the uncharacteristic discipline
come amid numerous warning signs that his reelection campaign is in trouble.
Polling has
consistently shown Trump trailing his likely Democratic rival, former Vice
President Joe Biden, by double digits nationally. Polling in critical swing
states and even traditionally red states alike has also shown Trump in perilous
territory.
All the
while, Trump’s approval rating has tanked, as the president has been kept off
the campaign trail by the virus. When he held his first rally in months last
month in Tulsa, Okla., less than half the stadium was full. The campaign
canceled what would have been Trump’s second rally several weeks ago, citing a
nearby tropical storm. And Trump last week set in motion a major campaign
shake-up, demoting his campaign manager and naming a new one heading into the
final months of the campaign.
Trump’s
poll numbers and the spike in cases also coincided with a greater willingness
from close allies to buck his rosy pronouncements about the virus as the
situation on the ground back home grew more dire — some criticized testing,
others bristled at threats to cut off federal funding to schools that don’t
reopen for in-person instruction, and still others pleaded with the president
to take a stronger position in favor of wearing face coverings.
The new
tone appeared to also extend to reporters, with whom the president was less
combative than usual on Tuesday, even as he deflected on a question about
whether voters should make November’s election a referendum on his handling of
the outbreak.
And Trump
didn’t mention Joe Biden, whose name gets worked into nearly every public
address the president makes.
Still, when
asked about his change in tone, Trump again insisted that coronavirus “will
disappear,” and that he had never disagreed with scientists’ recommendations on
social distancing, despite an aggressive push for the country to reopen,
including, in the coming weeks, schools.
And he
continued to hold up U.S. testing as unrivaled when pressed by reporters about
his administration’s attempt to block Congress from providing more money for
coronavirus testing and tracing in its next relief package.
The
president said he would be briefed on the issue at some point, while
maintaining that the country was processing “massive” numbers of tests.
“I think we
are doing tremendous amounts of testing, but if the doctors and the
professionals feel that even though we are at a level that nobody ever dreamt
possible that they would like to do more, I'm OK with it,” he said.
Trump ended
the briefing by teasing more of them, but he indicated that they could, as past
briefings had, veer away from the subject of coronavirus and touch on topics
perceived to be more helpful to his reelection prospects.
“We will
keep you abreast of this and talk about other topics like the economy, which is
doing well,” he said, noting that “the stock market had another good day” and
attributing that to the “positive things happening on this front.”
Brianna
Ehley contributed to this report.
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