President Donald Trump fiercely defended his administration’s response to the coronavirus during Monday’s task force briefing, complete with a campaign-ad-like video aimed at bolstering his case.
The visual production came after a weekend during which the president’s coronavirus task force held no briefings, which are meant to serve as updates for the public on the unfolding pandemic that has infected hundreds of thousands of Americans and killed tens of thousands.
Instead, Monday’s briefing appeared to be fashioned as a rebuttal to a damning report in The New York Times detailing Trump’s early inaction on the outbreak despite warnings from national security and public health officials.
Trump began the briefing by expressing his condolences to those hit by severe storms across the South overnight, before bringing up Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert, to clean up a statement he made over the weekend asserting that earlier mitigation efforts in the U.S. would have saved lives.
After Fauci assured reporters he was offering the walkback of his own volition, Trump retook the briefing room lectern and launched into a full-throated defense of the restrictions he placed on travel from China in late January, a decision he has repeatedly pointed to as evidence he took the virus seriously.
Then he asked for the briefing room lights to be dimmed.
On screens behind him, a montage of the timeline of the administration’s response to the virus began to play, splicing favorable news clips between headings like “the media minimized the risk from the start … while President Trump took decisive action … even as partisans sniped and criticized.”
The video included praise for the president from a bipartisan array of governors, but left out any criticism of the administration’s response to the crisis, including Trump’s repeatedly downplaying the threat of the virus and his administration’s failure to set up widespread testing throughout the country.
“We could give you hundreds of clips just like that. We have them,” Trump told reporters after the video ended. “We didn’t want this to go on too long.”
Asked why he felt the need to show such an overtly political message in the briefing room, a presentation that one reporter pointed out “looked a bit like a campaign ad,” the president responded simply: “So, we’re getting fake news and I like to have it corrected.”
He said the video had been put together in about two hours by Dan Scavino, the White House social media director and Trump’s reelection campaign manager, and a few others in the press office.
By the end of the video montage, Fox News was the only cable network that continued to carry the briefing, with CNN cutting to its fact checker and MSNBC blasting the political bent of the event.
“We are cutting into what was not a White House coronavirus task force briefing,” Ari Melber told viewers as MSNBC cut back to him. “We are going to avoid airing any more of this White House briefing until it returns to what it was supposed to be, which was the coronavirus task force providing medical information.”
Trump begins coronavirus briefing with a political show
0 Comments: