The President of the United States brainstorms at a coronavirus briefing.
Jesse Watters: The President’s spitballing and he’s asking questions. ‘Would it be possible to maybe target the virus through a cure using certain ingredients and using sunlight?‘ You didn’t believe the President was putting anyone in danger, did you?
Dr. Deborah Birx: No. He gets new information. He likes to talk that through out loud. And really have that dialogue. And so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time, immediately before the press conference. And he was still digesting that information.
Out loud on live television in a briefing to provide information and reassurance to the American public.
While some of the usual suspects jumped to Trump’s defense — among the most relentless, Scott Adams, who has decided that critics who disagree about the brilliance of Trump’s riffing on a cure, must lack intelligence …
— but mostly, even those in Trump’s camp, perceived the obvious: this wasn’t the time or place for musings that could have been spoken by a grade school student after learning that sunlight is a disinfectant. Parsing the words to win a Twitter argument misses the point. (Of course this is straight out of a well-worn playbook: missing the point is the point.)
Jonathan Chait suggested:
If Trump’s presidency has demonstrated any scientific principle, it is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who have a low ability to perform a task tend to overestimate their own ability to do it — or, to oversimplify it, they are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. “Maybe you can, maybe you can’t,” Trump allowed. “I’m not a doctor. But I’m like a person that has a good you know what,” tapping his head to indicate his gigantic brain.
Philip Bump and Ashley Parker (“Thirteen hours of Trump: the president fills briefings with attacks and boasts, but little empathy”) describe Thursday’s coronavirus briefing:
President Trump strode to the lectern in the White House briefing room Thursday and, for just over an hour, attacked his rivals, dismissing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as a “sleepy guy in a basement of a house” and lambasting the media as “fake news” and “lamestream.”
He showered praise on himself and his team, repeatedly touting the “great job” they were doing as he spoke of the “tremendous progress” being made toward a vaccine and how “phenomenally” the nation was faring in terms of mortality.
What he did not do was offer any sympathy for the 2,081 Americans who were reported dead from the coronavirus on that day alone — among nearly 53,000 Americans who have perished since the pandemic began.
They document, in detail, how these briefings have morphed into (what Parker has dubbed) the Coronavirus Show, featuring self-congratulations, attacks on the media and political rivals, fabrications by the President, and often medical advice from a man who is “not a doctor.”
“Like his campaign rallies, the president’s portion of the daily briefings are rife with misinformation. Over the past three weeks, 87 of his comments or answers — a full 47 minutes — included factually inaccurate comments.”
This is what passes for leadership in a country that with any other president in recent memory (or with John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Hillary Clinton) — would have by this time (even if one or another of them might have been caught flat-footed initially) a national strategy to defeat the coronavirus.
Moreover, the world is a witness. The pandemic:
Today it is leading in a different way: More than 840,000 Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and at least 46,784 have died from it, more than anywhere else in the world.
Yet Trump’s catastrophic failures, and his aversion to accountability, are not as significant politically as the Republican Party’s continuing obeisance to him. Never mind the mounting deaths — soon to exceed the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War over two decades. Never mind our country’s declining influence and security across the globe. The GOP is getting tax cuts, deregulation, and judicial appointments.