Donald Trump has acknowledged a current “big outbreak” of cases in the country.
Washington, United States:
US President Donald Trump on Monday vowed to resume televised coronavirus briefings and ultimately spoke out in favor of wearing a mask – a marked change in tone as polls show him heading for electoral disaster.
With just over 100 days before the election against Democrat Joe Biden, Trump is scrambling to respond to public anger over his troubled handling of the pandemic for months.
Ever since the virus first hit the United States, Trump has insisted that it would simply “go away”.
But that sunny claim is now very tense, even among loyal supporters, as they watch cases of COVID-19 surge into populous Republican-led states like Florida and Texas.
More broadly, polls show public confidence in Trump’s handling of the crisis.
Throughout, he sought to deny the seriousness of the problem, an attitude symbolized by his mockery of masks and his refusal to support doctors’ recommendations for mass use.
Trump addressed this Monday with a tweeted photo of himself in a black mask with the presidential seal and a call for patriotism.
“A lot of people say it’s patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance yourself,” Trump wrote. “There is no one more patriotic than me, your favorite president!”
However, his tweet stopped long before supporting calls from some for a national mandate to wear masks in public.
‘Do very well’
Trump, a longtime real estate salesperson and most recently a reality TV artist, says the real problem is that Americans just don’t hear the good news.
So, presumably from Tuesday, he will resume the regular evening White House televised briefings he gave until the end of April, often finding himself accused of giving confused or misleading information.
“I think it’s a great way to get information out to the public,” he told reporters. “We are doing very well in many ways.”
Trump acknowledged a current “large outbreak” of cases in the country but again distanced himself from responsibility for the problem, noting that the disease is also ravaging “Mexico, Brazil, many countries in Europe, everywhere, the Russia”.
“When you watch the news, the local news, and you see it, and that’s, it’s like everything with the United States. They never like to talk about what’s going on in the world,” a- he declared.
Trump said the briefings would focus on the good news about vaccine development and therapeutics.
“We think we are doing very well in this regard,” he said. “I think I’m going to bring in some of the big companies that are working very well.”
“We really find very good answers,” he said.
Public relations fiasco
Trump has great confidence in his ability in front of the cameras. He transformed the image of the US presidency during his first term with unprecedented flows of press conferences, tweets and rallies.
But his previous period as the nation’s chief pandemic spokesperson ended badly in late April.
Trump often turned what was touted as an opportunity to provide information to the anxious public into difficult discussions with reporters in the White House briefing room.
He finally dropped out of the events after a public relations fiasco where he reflected on air about the possibility of injecting a household disinfectant to fight COVID-19.
He later said he spoke “in a sarcastic manner”, although there was no evidence of this at the time.
– Polls slide –
The president has always sought to downplay the severity of the health crisis, hoping voters will instead focus on what he touts as his good stewardship of the economy.
In an interview with “Fox News Sunday”, he again claimed that the virus, which has killed more than 140,000 Americans and caused massive economic disruption, would somehow go away on its own.
“I’ll be right after all,” he said.
But with the virus on the rebound, he finds himself accused of not leading.
Biden opened a double-digit lead in election polls, and an ABC / Washington Post poll released on Friday showed nearly two-thirds of Americans are suspicious of Trump over the coronavirus.
Trump, however, appears to be eagerly awaiting his chance to return to the briefing room podium.
“We had very successful briefings. I was doing them and we had a lot of people watching, record numbers to watch. In the history of cable TV, there has never been anything like it,” did he declare.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
