Trump’s unhinged press briefings show a President desperate to deflect criticism about coronavirus crisis

Well, it’s back to Crazytown USA, and the first thing to note is that the White House still hasn’t been painted gold with yellow polka dots, nor has the Presidential limousine been replaced by something small with a rubber horn and confetti canons. We can, however, report, rather predictably, that the latest Trump press conference was crazier than the last.

Monday night’s buffoonery might have even slipped into illegality when Donald Trump used the context of a White House Press Conference to run something that resembled a campaign ad. It’s one of those small rules that comprise the Hatch Act, which attempts to keep some distance between the hard politics of governing from the softer politics of campaigning.

It’s a rule occasionally flouted by previous presidents, but which Trump has now completely obliterated.

Trump’s predicament is this. His re-election in November was always going to be grounded in the economy. America had maintained the growth that began under Obama. Trump has been happy to restyle it as the Trump Economic Miracle (aka “The Greatest Economy the World Has Ever Seen!”) and if (a huge “if”, mark you) voters could just ignore the honking horns of his clown show presidency, it made a somewhat compelling argument.

Put on your red hat for a moment and taste the cotton candy: no new wars, a growing economy, a more conservative judiciary and Supreme Court, a rollback on the kind of liberal policies that irritated social conservatives, repairing relationships with Russia, North Korea, and most of the world’s tin-pot dictators… Well, okay, the hat slipped there for a moment, but the point is surely made. Trump had a message he could sell to anybody who still cared about Making America Great Again.

And then COVID-19 began to kill Americans. Then the markets tanked, and employment figures began to resemble the Great Depression. America was also faced with the prospect of 100,000 or even 200,000 of its citizens dead. All of that underlined what was already obvious if you like your hats blue. Donald Trump would be a one-term president.

In truth, that is still likely to be the case. Incidentally, don’t underestimate the significance of Bernie Sanders’ surprise video call concession to Joe Biden yesterday. In the immediate days and weeks of the pandemic, Trump might have seen his approval ratings spike but that was the normal nervous response to imminent danger. It’s a political certainty in moments of crisis that people get behind their leader. It’s only in retrospect that misgivings are aired.

And so, as the new normality has settled across America, Trump’s numbers have declined, with many looking nothing like the perennial 46/52 splits that have characterised polling for the past three or more years. Distrust around the President’s handling of the crisis has started to eat into his previously solid base. Advisors have even started to warn him that his daily press conferences are harming him, it is reported.

Yet the more harm they do, Trump appears to feel ever-greater grievance and the need to set the record straight. The pattern is now established: the screaming of one night is therefore supplanted in the public’s memory by the even greater screaming of the next. And this has now been going on for weeks.

Monday, then, wasn’t just the start of the new week. It was Trump’s latest attempt to rewrite the narrative, to shout even louder than before about what a great job he’s been doing.

First, he needed to address the still-persistent rumours that he was going to sack Anthony Fauci, the hugely respected immunologist leading the US response to COVID-19. The latest “rumour” was based on the evidence of Trump himself retweeting a tweet from MAGAphyte DeAnna Lorraine which ended with the line “Time to #FireFauci”.

Typical of Trump, he addressed the problem by running straight into it. He pulled Fauci front and centre to issue a few words, which probably sounded either heartfelt or awkward depending on your leaning. Then it was time for the aforementioned political campaign ad, causing a spasmodic response in at least two of the major news networks who jumped back to their studios, as if they wanted no part of such an egregious breach of normal White House rules.

Two narratives are beginning to emerge. There’s one narrative (the closest to what we might recognise as “reality”) in which Trump ignored the virus until it was too late. Then there’s that other narrative, in which Trump always knew what he was doing. Even critics allow that the President was sensible to impose a travel ban on China back in January (though data also suggests many more travellers from China still entered the country).

This is the narrative you’ll hear from Trump at every opportunity. He will attempt to focus on the January ban, the government’s success in suppressing the COVID-19 in late March and early April, and then, he hopes, a rebounding market should he manage to reopen the country in May. All the rest he’ll claim is “fake news”. And don’t ever mention February…

The campaign ad finished, networks returned to the President, who was already mired in this very argument. To paraphrase:

“I did a great job in January!” he cried.

“What about February?” asked the journalists.

“That’s such a horrible question and fake news and it’s no wonder your ratings are slipping…”

There is, of course, considerable detail you can add to this sketch, and much of that detail will be repeated over the coming months. Social distancing has worked well in America and the forecasts of deaths have declined dramatically. How much the initial 100,000 – 200,000 figures were floated to make, say, 60,000 deaths, seem “reasonable” is another of those conversations we’re sure to hear on the campaign.

More pressing, though, is the relationship between the federal government and the states.

In his last big outrage of the night, Trump insisted that the president has “total power” when it comes to deciding whether to reopen states. You could hear the gasps in the room as he said that. He was not simply wrong but wrong in the way that causes red lights to flash around James Madison’s tomb. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York lost no time in ringing into CNN to explain the unconstitutionality of the President’s remarks. The President has no such power. Period.

It would be easy to dismiss this as another of Trump’s misunderstandings about the presidency, but this is all about the rather shameful politicking we’ve seen around Trump’s response to Coronavirus. From the start, he was intent on shifting the responsibility for dealing with the crisis to the states.

It’s not exactly the normal way American presidents deal with these big moments of national peril. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has “federal” in the title for good reason. Yet as Trump had been reluctant to use federal powers to help the response (since that would inherently put him at the centre of solving the problem), he is now more than happy to use federal powers to claim some of the glory.

To put it simply: he said it wasn’t in the President’s powers to tell people to stay at home but now he claims that the President has “total power” when it comes to telling those same people to get back to work.

And, yes, that really is as dumb as it sounds. Yet it might also work if he shouts it loudly enough and gives voters enough reasons to doubt the counter-narratives. China. Honk honk! Democratic hoax. Honk Honk! Fake news. Honk honk!

It’s easy to get so overwhelmed and disgusted by the noise of the clown show that you forget to ask why there is so much noise in the first place.