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Last week the president appeared on television and did not call the coronavirus a “hoax,” as he had for weeks. This, some concluded, could only herald the emergence of a New Trump.
As TNR’s Alex Shephard wrote, a Washington press corps obsessed with the aesthetics of governance is rushing to award gold stars to Trump for clearing the lowest of bars, while threatening to shove the real story—the administration’s failure to adequately prepare for the coronavirus—down the memory hole.
When Trump absurdly claimed that “he felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” CNN’s Dana Bash marveled at what she was hearing. “This was remarkable from the president of the United States,” she said. “This is an important thing to note and to applaud from an American standpoint, and from a human standpoint—he is being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone, today and yesterday.”
Such nonsense is not helping.
It was Trump’s choices that put us in the situation we are in now: thousands sick across the country, shelter-in-place orders in a growing number of major American cities, and a collapsing economy. The media can’t forget that.
