WASHINGTON — Three months and tens of thousands of deaths later, President Donald Trump was back in the White House briefing room on Tuesday touting his administration’s response to the coronavirus while conceding the situation is worse than he had previously acknowledged.
“It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better. Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is,” Trump told reporters. “It’s the way — it’s what we have.”
Some elements of the president’s performance were reminiscent of the last time Trump stood behind the podium in late April, like his insistence that the virus would simply “go away” one day and the promise that a vaccine was coming soon. But it was clear at other times in his half-hour appearance that the country, and the president, were both in a much different place.
When asked Tuesday about using a mask, Trump pulled one out of his pocket. “I have no problem with the masks,” he said. “I view it this way, anything that potentially can help, and that certainly can potentially help, is a good thing.” It was a noticeable shift in attitude from May, when he mocked a reporter for wearing a mask, saying he was only doing so to be “politically correct.”
The pandemic was no longer just a “burning ember” that had to be put out, as had Trump predicted during an April briefing. Now, he admitted, “we have embers and fires and we have big fires, and unfortunately now Florida is in a little tough, or in a big tough position.”
The optics and mood of the briefing had also changed. Trump was no longer flanked by the doctors and public health officials leading the response who had previously joined him at many of the then-daily sessions. Instead, he took the dais alone. When asked where Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci — two of the top doctors involved in the response — were, he said Birx was “right outside” without mentioning Fauci, or addressing why they weren’t also taking reporters’ questions.
This time, Trump generally stuck closely to reading from prepared remarks, as opposed to his mostly improvised comments during the past briefings. While the events during the spring often extended beyond two hours, he spoke for only about 30 minutes on Tuesday.
His appearance was the end result of weeks of debate inside the White House over how to shore up poll numbers showing sharp voter disapproval over his handling of the virus rather than as a way to convey information to the public.
Trump had mostly stayed away from discussing the pandemic in recent weeks, even as the number of cases surged. White House aides had pushed to keep him distant from the response, hoping that by keeping him out of the day-to-day public narrative, the administration could “depoliticize” the pandemic, a senior administration official said earlier this month.
Instead, Vice President Mike Pence was tasked as acting as the public face of the administration’s response, traveling to the hardest-hit states to meet with governors and holding press briefings. It was the same role Pence had played in early March, before Trump decided to launch his daily briefings.
But some advisers, such as White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, argued Trump should be more visible on the issue, saying his approval numbers had fallen since he curtailed the daily coronavirus-related appearances, and that he needed to be more visible on the issue.
“His approval rating on the pandemic was higher when he was at the podium — it was 51 percent in March — and I think people want to hear from the President of the United States,” Conway said last week, in response to a question from NBC News.
Some Republicans remained skeptical that the president’s coronavirus briefing redux was the right move. Former George W. Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted earlier in the day that the move was “a mistake. That room is a hot spot,” advising Trump to “rise above” and speak past the reporters in the room. “Talk personally. Show you care,” he wrote.
The White House has been hoping it can find a middle ground between the free-wheeling, hours-long events from April and Trump’s relative silence over the past months, said one outside adviser. With the pandemic dominating Americans’ daily lives, Trump’s move to only mention the crisis in passing has appeared out of touch, the adviser said.
In announcing Monday that he would be resuming the briefings, Trump described them as a way to talk about the things he believes his administration is doing well as part of its response and counter what he claims is an overly negative media narrative.
“I was doing them, and we had a lot of people watching, record numbers watching. In the history of cable television, there’s never been anything like it and we were doing very well,” Trump said of the briefings.
“… Frankly, a lot of the country is doing well. A lot of people don’t say, as you understand, but we have had this big flare-up in Florida, Texas, a couple of other places. And so I think what we’re going to do is, I’ll get involved and we’ll start doing briefings.”