Why Trump Just Can’t Quit His Daily Press Conferences

Nonetheless, the administration is sensitive to the perception that it’s media-obsessed. On Thursday The New York Times reported, “The president’s primary focus, advisers said, is assessing how his performance on the virus is measured in the news media, and the extent to which history will blame him.” The story has occasioned a days-long tirade from Trump, including a bizarre spree of tweets calling for journalists to have their “Noble” prizes revoked—if you know that it’s “Nobel” and journalists don’t win them, you’re ahead of the president—and a New York Post story, written with deep administration cooperation, that claimed Trump was so busy working on pandemic response, he sometimes had to skip lunch. Except, you know, he had all that time to write those tweets. As efforts to debunk claims of media obsession go, the effort was amusingly self-defeating.

The irony here is that the administration’s concern for communication isn’t entirely misplaced. Although there is no excuse for the federal government’s failures of policy and coordination, Charles Duhigg notes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Field Epidemiology Manual devotes substantial attention to the importance of communicating effectively with the public during an outbreak.

Read: How Trump’s foes get through his daily press briefings

So the problem is not that Trump has been focused on communication. The problem is that the communication has in practice been a catastrophe: both in the national leadership it has offered during a pandemic, and also in its more cynical role of boosting Trump’s political prospects. Politico reports that the White House is seeking new outlets for the energy currently devoted to the press conferences: “The daily briefings are no longer seen inside the White House as the most effective format for Trump, so [aide Hope Hicks] and others must develop other venues and weigh when he can again start to travel to events that so energize him.”

This is obviously destined to fail. Anyone still expecting a new, statesmanlike Trump to emerge is deluded, so televising Trump in different settings—Cabinet meetings, roundtables with business leaders, and so on—has two potential outcomes: Either he finds them unsatisfying and sulks through them, or he manages to hijack them with the same manic energy he brought to the briefings, and with the same results.

The scale of the challenge facing the administration during this pandemic would be daunting for any president, but a better-structured White House, having acknowledged the failure of the briefing gambit, would be searching for new ideas and approaches. Trump has only ever had one idea, though, and right now that sales pitch isn’t finding buyers.

David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.