This summary of Trump's daily briefings offers a great (implicit) argument against covering them live and points to the dangers of even engaging with them as "news," which they are not. /1
washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
Putting Trump on television for an hour or two a day allows him to "win the news cycle" in number of ways, even though these briefings highlight not only how ill-equipped and incapable he is of doing his job but his shocking lack of empathy for suffering Americans./2
Take, for example, this summary of things we "need to know" from a briefing the other day, one of which is whether Dr. Fauci appears to be in Trump's good graces. /3
This is exactly right: Trump is "a president who governs as if producing and starring in a reality television show, with each day a new episode and each news cycle his own creation, a successive installment to be conquered." But the presidency is NOT a reality show./4
And far too often the media covers these conferences as if they are players in his reality show. Who is he "feuding" with today? Where is Dr. Fauci? Did Trump boast about his Facebook rankings, his hair, his ratings, or about screwing models? /5
These are not the relevant questions. They distract from the key issues, what really ought to be newsworthy: his deadly incompetency in handling this crisis, alongside his seeming indifference to suffering. /6
Parker & Rucker write: "An enduring story line through the pandemic has been Trump’s hot-and-cold relationships with the governors of hard-hit states." This is to put the story of Trump's failure to govern into Trumpian terms and to make his one-sided actions seem reciprocal. /7
I have referenced this tweet before because it shows the danger of following a Trumpian script about "spats" with Governors. It is irrelevant whether Whitmer was "measured" in her comments; what is relevant are the needs that of the state of Michigan./8
Parker & Rucker miss the point in the same way when they write, "the two men feuded all day, culminating in a scathing letter Trump penned to Schumer." The issue with Trump's letter is not that it was "scathing" but that it was freaking unhinged. /9
Many presidents have written scathing letters. The newsworthy element of that letter, ignored by this Trumpian framing, is that is was one of the strangest, most inappropriate letter ever penned by a president, not that it was evidence of a "feud." /10
The key questions are: what is newsworthy and how to cover Trump? The coverage of these White House briefings seems to be badly missing the mark on both scores and for related reasons having to do with allowing Trump to set the narrative. /11
