The Washington Post took a look at last week’s Trump’s coronavirus response. It’s something.
President Trump began the seven-day stretch threatening — and then reneging on — a quarantine of the New York region. He ended it by announcing recommendations for everyone to wear face masks but stressed he would opt against sporting one himself.
In the days in between, Trump announced a 30-day extension of stringent social distancing guidelines (March 29), called into a freewheeling “Fox & Friends” gripe-a-thon (Monday), presented a dire assessment of how many Americans are expected to die of the coronavirus (Tuesday), launched a military operation against drug cartels (Wednesday) and stoked a feud with a senior senator from hard-hit New York (Thursday).
The novel coronavirus has decimated the economy, turned hospitals into battlefields and upended the daily lives of every American. But in Trump’s White House, certain symptoms remain: a president who governs as if producing and starring in a reality television show, with each day a new episode and each news cycle his own creation, a successive installment to be conquered.
Facing a global pandemic, Trump still seems to lurch from moment to moment, with his methods and messages each day disconnected from — and in some cases contradictory to — the ones just prior. The pattern reveals a commander in chief unsure of how to defeat the “silent enemy,” as he has labeled it.
Instead, Trump has focused on his self-image — claiming credit wherever he believes it is owed, attempting to project strength and decisiveness, settling scores with critics, boasting about the ratings of his televised news conferences and striving to win the cable news and social media wars.
“You have the president of the United States emceeing these reality TV shows,” said David Lapan, a former Trump administration official now working at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Lapan added that it is important for the president to address the public about a topic as serious as the pandemic but said Trump should quickly “turn it over to the experts and leave, and not turn it into this stream of consciousness of every topic he wants to talk about and the adoration that seems to be required from everybody else who participates.”
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley in an email statement accused Democrats and the media of trying to “destroy” Trump, who he said “has risen to fight this crisis head-on by taking aggressive historic action to protect the health, wealth and well-being of the American people.”
Still, confusion has emanated from the presidential bullhorn, with one of the few consistent themes simply Trump himself, starring as villain or savior, depending on one’s political persuasion.
“Trump is a sales guy, and it’s all about point of sale,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican operative and frequent Trump critic. “It’s not about repeat customers and follow-ups. He wants to get the sale — that’s it — he wants to sell you the undercoating for your car, and it’s not his problem if the car breaks driving off of the lot.”
The article goes on to lay out Trump’s lurch from one day to the next, from Saturday March 28th until Friday April 3rd. It shows a man who is so far over his head that he’s drowning. And it’s just one week…
The fact that Trump is compulsively driven to own the news cycle is a major reason he cannot do the job of president. Every day is new to him. He cannot plan, he cannot strategize, he cannot think beyond Fox and Friends in the morning and Hannity at night. It’s all he knows how to do.