McKay Coppins: “If you’ve tuned in to one of the daily coronavirus-task-force briefings, you’ve likely seen Trump himself make the case. ‘I knew it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,’ the president boasted last month. ‘I knew everything,’ he reiterated a couple of weeks later. Asked to assess his response to the virus, he responded emphatically, ‘I’d rate it at 10.'”
“Cable-news outlets have struggled with how to responsibly handle these briefings, which intersperse valuable updates from public-health officials with the president’s free-wheeling insult-comedy and medical misinformation. But the briefings command huge ratings…”
“This dynamic has effectively enabled the president to narrate America’s national trauma, while editing his own role in it. There are signs that his efforts are working: One Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to describe private research, told me that when voters were shown 90 seconds of a recent Trump briefing, his performance in a general-election matchup against Joe Biden improved by more than two percentage points.”
