Thread by @LarryGlickman

Trump has ignored or exacerbated the Coronavirus pandemic at every turn, a combination of incompetence, malevolence, & pretending it’s not happening. Yet the ⁦@washingtonpost⁩ refers here to Trump’s “front-and-center approach” to the virus. What? /1 washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…

It’s actually worse that that. They borrow the framing of the Trump campaign and contrast Trump’s “front-and-center” approach with Biden’s “more low-key campaign” and then they extensively quote a Trump official saying this. They never define or explain what this phrase means. /2

The phrase makes no sense as a description of Trump’s “approach,” if we can use such as a term for Trump’s narcissistic, unempathetic, incompetent response. The piece notes that Trump has basically stopped taking about it in recent months and has taken no useful actions. /3

Moreover, his reason for resuming the briefings, which rarely offered anything useful, are the ratings: “I’ll do it at 5 o’clock, which we were doing. It was a good slot. And a lot of people were watching.” Thanks to his failures, a pandemic rages and he cares about his “slot.”/4

“Front-and-center” suggests he has made fighting the pandemic a priority. He clearly has not and is restarting the briefings to feed his narcissism, as he himself admits in his mention of time “slots” and ratings./5

As the sub-hed says, Trump will try to put a “positive spin on the pandemic.” Thus, the resumption of the briefings is merely a continuation of Trump’s approach, which is all about blatantly dishonest spin and not about combatting a public health disaster of his own making./6